Motherboard/RAID Problem

[Justin]

I'm out of ideas on this one, maybe someone can lend some thoughts...

I have an ASUS P5E motherboard and three hard drives. Two Hitachi 2 TB drives I just purchased to mirror together for a storage drive and one Seagate 500 GB system drive. I'm running Windows 2008R2 but that's somewhat irrelevant.

Lastest BIOS update avaliable applied, all SATA drives.


The BIOS has three options, IDE, RAID, and AHCI. When I have it set to IDE Windows will load with all three drives showing up correctly. When I have the BIOS set to RAID or AHCI the BIOS will freeze before the RAID Controller BIOS even loads.

If I unplug my 500GB system drive the computer loads as far as it can without an OS drive in. I was able to enter the RAID utility and mirror the two drives successfully. Once I plug the 500GB back in the system locks up again. I can't even get into the BIOS with the 500GB plugged in.

There's no firmware update for the drives and I'm at a loss as far as what to do, other than software mirror them in Windows which is really not ideal at all.

 

[toyotanos]

You might have to set a boot drive priority to keep the 500 from trying to load up too quickly.

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar at all with RAID setups, but I know I had a similar problem when I put a memory card reader in my computer- it tried booting off of the memory card drive :/

 

[Poodles]

Windows usually requires RAID drivers on install (i.e. when you're installing windows). Also I can't remember if you can setup raid in that way with an extra drive like that, been a long time since I messed with RAID setups.

 

[Justin]

Windows usually requires RAID drivers on install (i.e. when you're installing windows). Also I can't remember if you can setup raid in that way with an extra drive like that, been a long time since I messed with RAID setups.

The system is freezing before it even loads the Intel (RAID) Controller, I really don't think the OS has anything to do with it. I work with RAID setups every day, and while I've had some pretty bizzare problems I've never seen anything like this.

 

[Poodles]

Jumper issues?

 

[Justin]

Jumper issues?

Jumper on the drive or board? The only jumpers on the drives are to limit the speed from 3gbps to 1.5. Those are all off. As far as jumpers on the board.... I have not really looked into that, I don't think there are any. I'll give it a shot, thanks.

 

[Poodles]

Yeah, break out the manual for your board and see if there is a jumper you have to move on the board.

 

[Justin]

Yeah, break out the manual for your board and see if there is a jumper you have to move on the board.

Oh forgot to update. Found one jumper. It's for clearing the BIOS memory. Everything else is strictly logical.

 

[Poodles]

Booo, it's an old board so was hoping it was that simple. May just be some limitation, but without combing through the info, I can't really say.

 

[Justin]

Booo, it's an old board so was hoping it was that simple. May just be some limitation, but without combing through the info, I can't really say.

Well Damnit.

I just grabbed a sata laptop drive I have laying around and it booted just fine. Why can't components just play nice together.

 

[Poodles]

Yeah, sounds like an IDE limitation. All drives have to be part of the RAID I bet.

 

[Justin]

Nah, my system drive now is a single 150 GB.

Something about this specific drive.

 

[Keros]

Well Damnit.

I just grabbed a sata laptop drive I have laying around and it booted just fine. Why can't components just play nice together.

Just so I'm on board (lol), when you got the sata laptop drive to work, was the RAID enabled and running? Which P5E board do you have? The various flavours probably have different chipsets between them, which may dictate your limitations. I know my board has very specific requirements to be in a RAID configuration; the primary chipset (intel P55 I think) that hosts the 6 main SATAII ports are either RAID or not, as a group. i.e. all 6 can be RAID 5, two can be RAID 1 or 0, or 4 (I think) as RAID 10. But the other ports not in the RAID (in sequence) will not be operating... leaving me one SATA port to use for my operating system via the secondary chipset (the JMICRON controller... can't remember the model number offhand).

The following won't be your problem if the laptop drive worked with the RAID running... but it could be that because a drive is on a disabled SATA port, the controller is saying "FU!" and locking up the computer. I've encountered on the newest ASUS boards controllers that can handle a SATA RAID and a stand alone drive... but I know my comp is not like that. In practice, what I mean is that you plug the 500GB drive into SATA1 on your primary controller, and it works fine. Plug the 2TB drives into SATA2 and SATA3, and everything's still cool. But if you turn on RAID 1 (which expects exactly two drives), with three plugged into the controller... you may well get funky shit happening. Removing the third drive fixes the problem because the controller expects exactly two drives... perhaps this is the problem, perhaps not.

Asus usually makes the primary controller's ports blue and secondary controller's ports black... and not all boards have a second storage management controller.

Long story short, call Asus and/or Intel, they really helped me out when I was researching motherboards that could support RAIDs.

 

[3p141592654]

I have a similar setup running on an NVIDIA chipset. I had to make the 3rd drive a striped RAID0 array with only one drive, then it was happy. But if you can't even boot into the RAID controller then this isn't going to help you.