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ICH10R RAID boot

idata
Employee
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I am trying to create a RAID-5 of 4 1.5 TB hard drives. I want Windows 7 to boot to it, but when I create the array at the Intel RAID Matrix bios level, it immiditally says it is not bootable in the Matric Controller. In my main bios, I can not set it to bootable either. Is there something wrong with my motherboard's bios.

EVGA X58 SLI (E758)

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idata
Employee
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Hi,

The issue you have is that the bootable RAID 5 you are making is 5gb size. Windows can only be bootable on a partition that is MAX 2gb. Therefore if your RAID controller lets you you will need to partition the RAID 5 after you have mad eit. If it dosne't let you then you will need to use some other software to do this. But to be honest in my experience it won't be the most stable configuration ever, then again you might be lucky.

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idata
Employee
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From what I understand, as long as the operating system supports the GPT file system, the OS can be installed on a volume of larger than 2TB. The Intel RAID controller will let me make the array, but it immediately sets non-bootable. I was wondering if this is a limitation to the ICH10R or my motherboard's bios? While I agree that it wont be the most stable configuration RAID 5 does have the parity protection that is the design of RAID 5 and should be sufficient.

idata
Employee
579 Views

After having the drive configuration set to RAID in the BIOS, I then made sure my boot order was set to normal so that the CDrom would get recognized first for installing to the first of two RAID volumes created. Specifically, I have the DG45ID motherboard with the latest BIOS as of this date with the G45 chipset and ICH10R raid controller in an HTPC get-up. There are 4 identical Hitachi 2TB 7200rpm Deskstar SATA drives set with a two volume RAID array. The first volume for the operating system I set to RAID 5 at the max I was able to set the volume to: 2047GB (2048GB and above made the array non-bootable). The second volume (as it will not let you create more than two volumes in an ICH10R raid array) I created a RAID 0 for the remaining space (scratch volume) and it read back as being non-bootable after volume creation. As the others have stated, there is no option that the user interface allows to select bootable capability or not. It is done automatically for you based on the size of the raid volume, be it in a single volume array or two volume array as is the case for this ICH10R chipset.

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idata
Employee
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Had the same issue and figured out that by setting the first vol to 120Gb, it is bootable and the second data to 5.XTb - No issues.

Something odd about the Intel options. What idiot decided to hard code it so you cannot use a vol over 2Tb is beyond me! Operating Systems come and go and technology is advancing every day.

Soon 2Tb boot will not be sufficient and then you are out of luck.

Intel, please wake up and correct this in the next firmware release.

Best of luck,

Danny

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idata
Employee
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I've spent the better part of two weeks bench testing different drive configurations on a new DX58SO2. I determined that the Marvell 6Gb controller is a fraud. I set up a 2T RAID 0 array using WD SATA III drives and found that it's throughput was lower than a single SATA III drive on the same ports. It was noticeably slower.

My next brilliant idea was to create a six disk 5T raid 5 array using six Western Digital WD1002FAEX SATA 6 Gb/s 1 TB drives.

Not bootable

I found this thread.

Thank you.

While it has saved me from certain insanity tonight, I'm dumbfounded as to why Intel's manuals neglect to mention the array size limitation?

Perhaps Intel could see its way clear to update it's documentation to include Windows 7 (the most recent FAQ covered installing with Windows Vista). Also, maybe it would be nice if they could clearly spell out exactly how to configure their product. How about adding more info about this size limit and making it visible on packaging? It sure would save a lot of time and grief.

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