Wanna go for a RAID?

[Drufuss]

Hi there!

I'm currently running Win XP on my P5Q board with 5 partitions on 2 hdd's in AHCI mode. (there is opensuse 11.0 on the first hdd which can easily be reinstalled and Vista on a 3rd hdd).

I already did the "change IDE-mode to AHCI in win xp without reinstalling" so now i was wondering if i can set up a Raid for XP without reinstalling the system.

Any ideas or suggestions on how i could do that?

(Yes, i already tried google and the search function but somehow i didn't find the answer that made me think "no, can't do it" or "okay, let's try that")

Greetings

Dru

[rjs735]

Most raid setups req a reformat of the drives involved. Having said that it really depends on how the RAID controller you have. There a case you could argue and that is mirrored drives . If you select mirroring and add a drive the same size you may get away without loosing data. My NAs box allows this but Raid comes in many controller flavors. Mine is not an Intel RAID controller.

I would read up on Intel Matrix RAID as I belive you have ICH10R controller.

[JMerrick]

I run both my systems in RAID 0. I'm happy with the performance, but it's mostly for lengthening my e-penis.

[Drufuss]

Well, Intel documentation talks about setting drives in BIOS to "raid-ready", but on the P5Q i only have "IDE" or "RAID" or "AHCI".

When i select "RAID" i get the "press ctrl-i for ..." screen where i could set up a raid if i want, or do nothing and wait till the system doesnt boot because it can't find any boot device.

Greetings

Dru

[Alegria]

The way to switch form AHCI to RAID is basically the same like going from IDE to AHCI. "RAID ready" means you put the controller into RAID mode but do not create a RAID volume via the controller BIOS.

Boot up your system in AHCI mode, modify the registry with iastor.reg (download and rename to iastor.reg) attached below to know your ICH RAID PCI device ID (2822 that is) as a critical device. iastor.sys has to be present in your drivers directory. Service iaStor will be added to the registry, too.

Reboot and switch to SATA RAID mode in your motherboards BIOS. Windows should be booting now and recognize the new hardware. Complete Intel Matrix Storage manager installation as usual. That's it. RAID mode also features Native command queuing support.

There are several options to migrate from non-RAID to RAID but of course this always requires at least one empty disc with the same capacity as the source drive you want to migrate to a RAID (doesn't matter if going from single drive to RAID1 or from single drive to RAID0 other combinations are possible).

[Drufuss]

Hi Alegria!

To put the system from IDE to AHCI i simply installed the intel-drivers (ignoring windows warning that this isn't the correct hardware) and rebooted, switching from IDE to AHCI mode in BIOS upon rebooting.

To go from AHCI to RAID i have to modify the registry with your file (is this the correct file for ICH10R/P5Q?) and reboot, switching from AHCI to RAID mode in BIOS upon rebooting?

That sounds too easy (as did IDE to AHCI, but it worked).

After this i can add empty hdd's to the system (same size as present hdd's) and set up a raid with Intel software?

Greetings and many thanks so far

Dru

[Alegria]

Sounds too easy... well, it is that easy, as long as you have iastor.sys in your %systemroot%\system32\drivers directory.

Only thing to do to make the controller "RAID-ready" is to switch the BIOS option from AHCI to RAID. Yes, this should work for your ICH10R, it has the appropriate PCI-ID. You do not have to enter the RAID-BIOS itself after switching to RAID mode in the main BIOS of your P5Q. You can create arrays migrating non RAID-disks to array disks from the matrix storage console afterwards.

[Drufuss]

Thanks a lot Alegria!

Can't wait to try it.

[Alegria]

Are your Seagate drives up to date with the latest firmware? You might get in trouble if one of the drives goes offline during RAID operation. Although I have found this to be the case with ICP/Adaptec SAS controllers using these drives and with some LSI logic SAS controllers on server machines, it might be a good thing to check before setting up arrays. There is more information to find here: Seagate Knowledge Base

And here: Seagate Knowledge Base

[Drufuss]

Thanks for the reminder.
Haven't had the time so far to check my drives for faulty firmware. Will do that before anything RAID.

Greetings

Dru

[Drufuss]

Yippie!

Going from AHCI to RAID was really easy, thanks to your .reg file Alegria.

Now the only (but major) problem i have is, how transfer my existing partitions to the RAID 5 volume i'm planning to create.

Acronis Disk Driector Suite says "no harddisks found" (does not like AHCI or RAID it seems) and Gparted won't recognize the RAID volume (sees three hdd's instead of one single volume).

Any ideas?

Greetings

Dru

[Drufuss]

Finally everything is set like i wanted it to be.

Before migration:
2 x 500GB hdd's,
3 partitions on the first (20 GB system, 10 GB page/temp/etc, 400 GB My documents)
2 partitions on the second (300 GB programs, 200 GB movies)

After migration:
3 x 500GB hdd's in Raid5,
5 partiotions (20 GB system, 10 GB page/temp/etc, 400 GB My documents, 300 GB programs, 200 GB movies)

To achieve this, i connected 2 smaller hdd's to the system and moved the partitions from the second hdd to them. Then i added the third 500 GB hdd and created the Raid5 volume with Intel Matrix Storage Manager (created the 931GB volume and automatically migrated the three partitions on the first hdd to it), after that i simply created two additional partitions in the remaining space, copied the contents of the 2 smaller hdd's two these partitions. After changing drive letters accordingly i removed the 2 small hdd's.

Don't know if anything really improved now. Well, thanks to raid5 one faulty hdd won't result in any data loss, not the i had any failling hdd's in the past.
Windows boot time may be shorter, but now i have that "press Ctrl-I to configure Raid" screen between POST and booting, so overall it needs the same time from power-button to usable system.

Greetings

Dru