Since i was having some difficulties while changing my motherboard with onboard Raid and maybe someone has the same problems i wanted to post this little story.
I had an Asus A8V board with Promise Raid onboard and used it with two SATA 160GB Harddisks in a Raid 1 (mirror) Array. It was working fine and i was getting used to how the Promise Bios works.
Unfortunately the Mainboard was AGP and i needed an upgrade to PCIe.. so i bought the Asus A8N-E with onboard Raid from VIA.
The first impression was good. I activated the Raid controller, set the two SATA ports to Raid and looked into the Raid Bios. Raid was found and worked "Healthy"... Very good, i thought and started up, since Windows was already on the harddisks....
But Windows is not as easy as i hoped for which the bluescreen told me even in Safe Mode. Now i had two options.. try to boot somehow and backup all data (160GB is a little too much) or just disconnect one drive from the array and boot up with one harddisk. Install everything on that and then copy everything i need (like profile) from the disconnected drive.
At this moment i loved Raid 1, since i did not have to backup everything.. i had a backup. To make the story short: i disabled the Raid, installed everything on one disk, connected the second drive and copied everything from one disk to another.
Then things got wired. I reactivated Raid and the Bios told me the Array was healthy.. that could not be since the data on both disks differ... I tried to boot, but it did not (which i later discovered was my fault since Windows never installed a raid driver, becouse it was disabled)..
The Bios was also very wired since there is an option for rebuild an Array, but when you press R for rebuild you can choose a disk from the Array.. but no info what will happen. Am i choosing the master disk or the disk which is going to be rebuild? The documentation on this part is .. well there is no documentation.. All it says is: then press enter and the rebuild process will start...
Very good.. really... Who wrotes crap like that? Did people actually get paid for manuals which don't help?
The best part, after you choose a disk nothing happen...absolutely nothing.. With the Promise Bios you see a progress Bar and everything.. but here.. nothing..
After i realized that windows could not even start without the raid driver i was finally able to boot and then something happend i did not think of.. automatically in windows a info tray window appeard telling me the reconstruction of the array is in progress...
Ahhhh... now it's rebuilding the array... in windows.
So at the end i have to say i made some mistakes and should just have installed the Raid Driver in Windows to make everything work.
But i also have to say that VIA should rebuild their Bios so people are able to make this things in the Bios.. doing that kind of things in Windows is.. well it's not only bad.. it's ..unthinkable....
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