I’ve been running an Asus P8Z77-V with an SSD, HDD and RAID5 in the SATA=RAID config for maybe 10 years and using the “Universal 64bit Intel RSTe AHCI+RAID drivers v13.1.0.1058 mod+signed by Fernando” with updated RAID BIOS 13.1.0.2126 for 5 years. No problems.
Yesterday, I “upgraded” to Win11 and got “A disk read error occurred” on reboot. I had to change SATA to AHCI to boot up, and now my RAID5 is offline.
Can anyone suggest a way of getting the RAID5 back online, please? Is there driver I can install compatible with the RAID config in BIOS?
Edit by Fernando: Thread moved into the Win11 Category and title customized
@Bunzer
Where is your system drive C: and the boot partion? Are they inside or outside of the Intel RAID Array?
Which data transfer protocol uses the non-RAIDed SSD?
What about doing a fresh OS installation (after having done a backup of your previously used system drive)?
I’m hoping to avoid a fresh install as I have a lot of software installed (at least 140, according to Windows) and customised over many years.
I should have said that, since setting the BIOS SATA mode to AHCI, the system boots up fine and all volumes are visible, apart from the P: volume which is the RAID5 array.
If I remember correctly, in Windows 10, I did one of 2 things:
I installed the “Universal 64bit Intel RSTe AHCI+RAID drivers v13.1.0.1058 mod+signed by Fernando” and then rebooted. After changing the CMOS setup SATA mode from AHCI to RAID, the PC booted up, auto-installed the RAID driver and Windows started up.
I went into Device Manager, selected the ATAPI driver and updated it by browsing to the “Universal 64bit Intel RSTe AHCI+RAID drivers v13.1.0.1058 mod+signed by Fernando”, after a reboot (and change from AHCI to RAID in CMOS seup) everything worked.
The problem is, I can’t remember if either of these were the way I installed the driver, or maybe it was even another way.
In any case, would the old driver even work in Windows 11?
I’m no nearer to getting access to my RAID volume.
I checked my system and the win-raid certificates and iaStorAC.inf are still registered, but the Win11 upgrade used the “Standard SATA AHCI Controller”.
I created a Windows Recovery USB drive, changed to RAID mode in CMOS, booted from USB, and listed the volumes with “wmic”. The system and RAID volumes were listed and accessible without loading any extra drivers.
So why won’t Windows boot in RAID mode? I dodn’t get it.
One other fact which may have a bearing on things: the system drive is MBR and just contains the OS/apps/user partition and recovery partition. This works fine with Windows 11 and AHCI mode set in the BIOS. I read online that Windows 11 requires GPT instead of MBR, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here.
Any guidance would be hugely appreciated.
By the way, I attempted to load the RST driver from the recovery boot command prompt anyway (using drvload) to see if it worked, and got error 0x80070103 - which means either it’s incompatible or already installed, so I’m no wiser. The fact that I was able to access the RAID volume from the recovery command prompt without loading any extra drivers suggests it’s possible to get this working, but how, I have no idea.
@Bunzer
You may not be able to get Win11 properly installed onto an existing Intel RAID Array. Microsoft has never officially supported such configuration. My advice: Make a backup of the important data, break the RAID array and do a fresh OS installation onto a single SSD.
Win11 is installed on the SSD. I don’t want to install it on the RAID. All that is on the RAID5 array is 1TB of photographs (and I have a backup). The SSD boots fine in AHCI mode. And I can read the separate SATA HDD fine too.
How is it that I can boot WinRE from USB in RAID mode and read the RAID drive too without any extra software, but it won’t read the system boot loader?
What I’m saying is that WinRE on USB isn’t loading any fancy drivers by default (as far as I know), and it’s still able to read all of my drives, including the SSD boot and HDD RAID arrays (in RAID mode set in CMOS). Nothing special is needed.
Yet it can’t boot from the SSD in RAID mode (set in CMOS). I have to change CMOS setting to AHCI, and so the RAID drive disappears.
So this issue appears to be the PC’s ability to read the SSD’s boot sectors in RAID mode. The SSD should be readable without special drivers, because I can see SSD volumes when booting from WinRE on USB in RAID mode.
Sorry to keep carping on. I feel like I’m close to solving this. It’s very frustrating.
I’m wondering if it’s anything to do with the SSD still being formatted as MBR (it’s been upgraded from at least one previous version of Windows). I’m going to attempt to convert it to GPT and see if that helps. I should probably do it anyway, judging by what I’ve read about Windows 11.