Intel ICH10 onboard RAID array...BIOS problem

[hal900x]

When I built my system upon a MSI P45 Neo3-FR LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard I used 6 sata drives. 3 individual drives for boot/apps/games, a RAID5 array with 3 large Western Digital drives on the ICH10 onboard raid. I reflashed my consumer WD drives into Enterprise mode for reliability and everything went swimmingly for years. Recently I had to clear my BIOS settings because of a lost BIOS password. While I had the PC open and removed one of the individual SATA drives that had gone bad over the years (R.I.P. 36G Raptor from 2003). But guess what, I'm a f**king moron who thought replicating the old settings would be a breeze, after all I'd done it a thousands times when I was setting this up...IN 2008.

Now I have two noticable problems. Problem 1: Windows will not boot. Boot menu indicates a problem and offers to repair Windows or boot normally. So far I have not attempted a repair because I think this is a configuration issue.

Secondly, the boot menu and POST looks unfamiliar. Usually when I hit F11 to choose a boot disk, iirc I saw 4 drives: 3 physical and the 1 RAID drive. Now: If I choose RAID mode on the ICH10, every drive is prefixed with [RAID]. This isn't what I remember. If I choose AHCI I see each invididual drive as a boot option. Even stranger, I now see the ICH10 controller bios config screen come up (press ctrl-i for raid config etc.]. That never happened before either.

Now, I didn't have the ICH10 set to AHCI mode before did I? The ICH10 can't run a RAID5 array when it's set to AHCI can it? For some reason I was thinking it can.

So I'm very much confused, both about why Windows will no longer boot, whether I previously had my ICH10 controller mode set to RAID or AHCI (or even SATA, which I highly doubt), and if the two are related. Maybe the fact that Windows won't boot is just because I need to iron out the hundred or so overclock/tweak options but I set everything to failsafe/auto and nothing changed. It's weird that the ICH10 bios screen is now showing up during POST (and by the way, it does show the RAID array with the correct members as it flashes on by...I have not tried entering the ICH10 bios config via ctrl-i yet). Maybe I hid it somehow and it was indeed set to RAID mode?

I'm desperate. And sad. And it's very late. Please help.

 

[hal900x]

When I built my system upon a MSI P45 Neo3-FR LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard I used 6 sata drives. 3 individual drives for boot/apps/games, a RAID5 array with 3 large Western Digital drives on the ICH10 onboard raid. I reflashed my consumer WD drives into Enterprise mode for reliability and everything went swimmingly for years. Recently I had to clear my BIOS settings because of a lost BIOS password. While I had the PC open and removed one of the individual SATA drives that had gone bad over the years (R.I.P. 36G Raptor from 2003). But guess what, I'm a f**king moron who thought replicating the old settings would be a breeze, after all I'd done it a thousands times when I was setting this up...IN 2008.

Now I have two noticable problems. Problem 1: Windows will not boot. Boot menu indicates a problem and offers to repair Windows or boot normally. So far I have not attempted a repair because I think this is a configuration issue.

Secondly, the boot menu and POST looks unfamiliar. Usually when I hit F11 to choose a boot disk, iirc I saw 4 drives: 3 physical and the 1 RAID drive. Now: If I choose RAID mode on the ICH10, every drive is prefixed with [RAID]. This isn't what I remember. If I choose AHCI I see each invididual drive as a boot option. Even stranger, I now see the ICH10 controller bios config screen come up (press ctrl-i for raid config etc.]. That never happened before either.

Now, I didn't have the ICH10 set to AHCI mode before did I? The ICH10 can't run a RAID5 array when it's set to AHCI can it? For some reason I was thinking it can.

So I'm very much confused, both about why Windows will no longer boot, whether I previously had my ICH10 controller mode set to RAID or AHCI (or even SATA, which I highly doubt), and if the two are related. Maybe the fact that Windows won't boot is just because I need to iron out the hundred or so overclock/tweak options but I set everything to failsafe/auto and nothing changed. It's weird that the ICH10 bios screen is now showing up during POST (and by the way, it does show the RAID array with the correct members as it flashes on by...I have not tried entering the ICH10 bios config via ctrl-i yet). Maybe I hid it somehow and it was indeed set to RAID mode?

I'm desperate. And sad. And it's very late. Please help.

Have to say, I'm disappointed that 65 people looked at this thread and nobody replied, even to ask for clarification. It's pretty simply really, and anyone middling familiar with SATA controllers could have explained that: yes, you can set ICH10 controllers to AHCI mode and still run a raid5 array. There are 3 modes available on mine: SATA, RAID, AHCI. I've seen posts elsewhere asserting that RAID enables AHCI, but never vice-versa. Untrue. I still don't remember how I built the array, but I distinctly remember extensively researching this, and that in certain circumstances you get some small performance benefits by building it in AHCI mode rather than RAID mode.

As far as why Windows wasn't booting, I have no idea. I ended up just running the Windows repair and somehow it worked. There must have been some setting in my BIOS that was specific to my install, which was changed.