[RESOLVED] could not set up raid 0 on win 7

[greendesert]

I have setup raid 0 on my amd biostar mainboard. When I am trying to install win 7, it asks for drivers. I thought only win xp needed drivers (press F6) ?
I dont have a floppy drive. I downloaded the driver from both asrock and biostar sites and they seem to be the same. Burned it on a disk and also copied it on a usb drive. The install sees those drives but does not find the driver ?
What am I doing wrong ? Are we looking for these :

ahcix64s.cat
ahcix64s.inf
ahcix64s.sys

[Midknyte]

Post the exact MB model. Make sure you have the RAID drivers, not the AHCI drivers.

At the "Where do you want to install Windows" screen, there should be a button that says Load Driver. That's when you would load the RAID driver from your flash drive.

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/operat...-part-1_10.htm

[greendesert]

The mainboard is : BIOSTAR A870U3 AM3
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813138318

The driver I am trying to use is Serial ATA AHCI/RAID 3.2.1540.24
http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/driver.php?S_ID=524

Since, I don't have a floppy drive, I extracted and copied the files to usb drive (even tried with burning on a cd disk).

Now the images :
raid setup menu


raid mode set to 0 with two drives


striped, drive assigned




this window immediately come with no option to load drivers


I try to browse and load drivers (a-data is the usb and the folder for driver is x64

I get the message no device driver found and the installation is stalled ?

Ahhhh... I notice this while posting the images ... it is asking for cd / dvd driver ?

[Midknyte]

Something's not right. Look at the screenshots in the link I posted. It shouldn't be asking for drivers that early. Is this a genuine original Win7 disc?

[greendesert]

I am trying with Win 7 OEM. Could this be the reason ?
Do you find the raid setup process okay ?

[ua549]

Does the OEM disk match the hardware you are using? Many OEM installation disks are customized for the product line they accompany. These include HP and Dell OEM software disks. If you are using the on-board chipset, the OEM software may have already loaded conflicting drivers.

I had no trouble setting up raid on my Win7 Supermicro workstation with an Areca raid card.

[Train]

If your package looks like one of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...eId=1&name=OEM

it will work fine. But as ua549 brought out, pc maker OEM dvds will not.

[Midknyte]

Do you find the raid setup process okay ?

As I said, you get to the "Where do you want to install Windows" screen and add the RAID drivers. Windows will see the RAID array as one disk. Other than that, the install is the same.

I just noticed that you are using 2 different sizes of drives in the RAID array. You really should use 2 identical drives. Since the smaller drive is 1TB, your total RAID array will only be 2TB, not 2.5.

Why do you want to RAID0 2 large drives? The risk of losing data is higher on a RAID0 array, and the larger the drives the greater the loss.

[greendesert]

It turns out that one of the (new) Hitachi drive has bad sectors. I had to RMA it. Otherwise, the setup process worked but later it stalled. I will close this thread as solved.

if I have any more issues later on, it is better to open a "specific" thread for that itself

thanks everybody !