The Dr's Office

1. Enabling ICH10R SATA RAID After Installing Windows | Team Hack-a-Day, on March 9th, 2009 at 12:31 pm Said:

   [...] Typically, changing your BIOS’ SATA configuration to enable AHCI or RAID after you have already installed Windows results in a BSOD each time you reboot the machine. DrNathan shows us how he solved that problem on an Intel board with an ICH10R SATA controller using a little manual driver installation magic. [...]

2. 
   Paul Fain, on March 17th, 2009 at 7:26 am Said:

   I tip my hat to DrNathan for an excellent job. After many hours of fruitless research and web browsing, I found this solution that really works. I have a P5QC Asus board with Intel ICH10R Southbridge Raid chipset. I had already installed Vista Ultimate using default IDE settings in the BIOS. I later decided to set up a Raid 5 volume with 3 SATA Seagate HD. I did not want to reinstall the OS. For those of you who have tried this, you know how frustrating it can be. I had almost decided that it was impossible when I stumbled upon this solution. I hope others discover this easy way to set up Raid without having to reinstall their Vista OS.

3. 
   DrNathan, on March 17th, 2009 at 8:04 pm Said:

   Paul,

   Glad the article helped! I know how frustrating it can be to tackle this problem, so I am glad I could provide you with the steps you needed to get the job done. I tried a million different things before finding the registry entries posted online and this was the only thing that worked.

4. 
   Marc, on March 21st, 2009 at 4:41 pm Said:

   Be careful with that reg script if your system is on CurrentControlSet1 and if the version of iastor.sys is newer than the one you have used in yoru script.

5. 
   Bruce Chastain, on March 22nd, 2009 at 4:25 pm Said:

   Thank you so much for this post. It worked flawlessly on my ASUS P5E with the ICH9R after countless hours of searching for a solution. I had tried a registry patch (and iastor.sys) I found elsewhere, but that only got me in to AHCI mode, not RAID. RAID sitll blue screened. Your registry patch did the trick and my XP Pro is now running in RAID mode.

6. 
   DrNathan, on March 24th, 2009 at 8:42 am Said:

   Marc, great point on the iastor.sys version observation. I assume one could simply update the version number as needed, or download an older version of the Matrix Storage Manager to get it moving.

   Bruce, glad I could be of help. I, like you, searched the web for hours before finding a solution. I figured the more I got it out there the better it is for everyone. This topic is the most searched for / visited on the site, so a lot of people must be having the same issue.

   Thanks for stopping by!

   DrNathan

7. 
   Howard, on March 24th, 2009 at 5:25 pm Said:

   DrNathan –

   Thanks so much! However, I have the Dell Studio XPS i7 system and this did not work for me. I performed all of the steps you outlined and I still get the BSOD just after the Windows logo appears on the screen, and an instantaneous reboot.

   Do you happen to have any further ideas? Here’s what I did *before* finding your post:

   1. Used Altiris (now Symantec) RapidDeploy (similar to Ghost) to move the original factory install from the shipped 640GB onto my new 1.5TB Seagate.
   2. Booted the system – everything worked fine.
   3. Shut down the system, installed the secondary 1.5TB Seagate disk.
   4. Booted the system – everything worked fine.
   5. Rebooted, changed SATA mode to RAID, experienced BSOD problem described above.
   6. Attempted many fixes found via Google’ing, including extracting the drivers and “inserting” them during a Windows Vista “repair” operation. Nothing worked.

   I then performed the steps you outlined above, to no avail.

   Anyone have any ideas for me? I feel like I can’t migrate my old system’s data to the new one until I have RAID protecting it via mirrored disks. And I’m too far invested in setting this system up to want to start over from a fresh install.

   HELP! Please….?

   Thanks!

8. 
   Howard, on March 24th, 2009 at 7:31 pm Said:

   Update: I realized I was not using v. 8.6.0.1007 of the Driver. So, I found a link to it and attempted to use that instead.

   UNFORTUNATELY it did not work either – same bad results.

   So, I’m still looking for help.
   (Also, in my original message, I forgot to mention that I am using Vista Home Premium 64 bit.

9. 
   DrNathan, on March 25th, 2009 at 9:03 am Said:

   Hmm, I wonder why it is not working for you at all. Have you tried changing the entries in the .reg file from “ControlSet001″ to “CurrentControlSet”? That might work out for you a little better. Also, are you certain that you are choosing the 64-bit version of iastor.sys when copying the file over?

   Give it a shot and let us know.

10. 
    manny, on March 26th, 2009 at 5:04 pm Said:

    You freakin’ genius, I love you!

    After all searching, I decided to backup my hard drive with acronis and do a universal restore, because some reason windows wouldn’t let me repair the installation. But after that said 4 hours to backup, and after waiting a couple, I thought I can’t be bothered with this, there must be any easier way.

    And there was! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

    Also 2 quick tips which may help:

    1. To find iastor.sys easily and faster, just use the search tool with the term “iastor” (no quotations) on the windows folder and your find 6 files called iastor.xxx. You’ll see by the directory names, 3 are for 32bit, and 3 for 64bit. Depending on your OS copy them to your desktop. But make sure you search while the installation is still up showing the error, my installation kept deleting these files straight away after you closed it.

    2. One of the 3 files is an inf file. I think you can just right click and press install for it to install the files and reg entries properly. However I used the reg file on here before I tested that out.

    The second tip may help those if the reg file above doesn’t work.

    Hope this helps, and thanks for your help!

11. 
    DrWho, on March 26th, 2009 at 5:33 pm Said:

    DrNathan — Great stuff!! Simple and well explained.

    I added RAID support by following your instructions to the letter to two computers with Intel mother boards that I just built .

    Thanks for your help!

12. 
    caslaw, on March 26th, 2009 at 9:13 pm Said:

    Great work Doc! I searched for about half an hour and then stumbled upon your excellent solution.

    I do have a question. I am running i7 on Asus p6t with ICHR10. I followed your steps closely, restarted, set to raid, configured Raid 5 for data, and windows Vista 32 loaded successfully. Vista then proceeded to automatically install drivers. Everything looked okay but required a restart. I installed the Intel Matrix software and then restarted.

    After restart Vista started to load, got past the load screen, and then continued on a dark screen for over 15 minutes in what appeared to be a looping cycle (consistent hdd light and no audible drive activity). Hard restart, same result. New Raid 5 array, same result. No BSOD, just endless loop with black screen.

    I confirmed that the iastor.sys file is where it should be. I am wondering if I should restore to an earlier point and start over. Is there any harm in repeating the regedit process (resulting in duplicate instructions)? Should I restore and start over?

13. 
    DrNathan, on March 27th, 2009 at 5:01 am Said:

    Manny,
    Great idea to use the search function to find iastor.sys. I think that’s how I found it during the initial run through. I was also working with Acronis and getting ready to try a Universal Restore before I said, “Forget it!”

    caslaw,
    Your issue seems pretty interesting. Seeing as you were able to boot into Vista after configuring the RAID array one time, I would have to think there is something strange going on with your Intel Matrix Storage Manager software installation. You could try rolling the computer back to an earlier point and giving it another go as the regedit process won’t hurt anything, it will simply overwrite the existing values.

    I do have one suggestion though – try backing the RAID config down to something simple like RAID 0 across two of the drives or RAID 1 if you can, then booting the system to see how it behaves. I am wondering if there is a problem with RAID 5 vs simpler configurations on your particular system. If that gets you up and running, try grabbing Intel Matrix Storage Manager again from Intel’s site as they have updated the application since this post was published.

    Keep us posted on your progress!

14. 
    caslaw, on March 27th, 2009 at 11:30 am Said:

    Doc:

    Thanks for your reply.

    I rolled back to the restore point where the intel drivers were installed and set to IDE but got the same boot hang. I then used the Vista cd to check for errors – no errors. Used cd to roll back to the last restore point before I did the regedit. Back to desktop. Confirmed iastor.sys file was not in directory. Download gone. Decided best option was to restore the hard drives to ide so I could start over. Deleted raid volume in bios, restarted, all 3 raid 5 drives show up in disk manager but as unpartitioned. Tell disk manager to reformat drives and partition. Disk manager hangs and fails!

    Something strange must have happened during the process that is now causing a driver conflict? Hard to explain why disk manager cannot reformat the blank drives. Unplugged the blank drives and now getting normal startups but hangs on shut down (same consistent pulsing hdd light). Looking at reinstalling vista from scratch and installing raid from there (sorry). Fortunately, this was a fresh install, so it is not the end of the world as we know it. Looks like I am running a very similar setup as Paul above (ICHR10 and raid 5) so I suspect an anomaly during my process.

    BTW, interested in what you think of raid 5 versus single drives in terms of drive failure rate versus data integrity versus read error rate on recovery (some say 50% chance on rebuild from raid 5 failure).

15. 
    DrNathan, on March 27th, 2009 at 3:35 pm Said:

    caslaw,

    I’m sorry to hear that it still has not worked out for you. The behavior you are seeing is pretty odd, I must say. If you removed the raid volume and switched everything back to IDE mode but still had issues with disk manager, something else is afoot.

    If I were you, I would reinstall Windows at this point, which it sounds like you are strongly considering. The good thing there is that if you do the install with RAID already enabled, you should have zero problems with your array once everything is finished. Most RAID drivers I have ever needed are already built into the Vista disc, so you probably will not need anything extra to get your fresh install off the ground. Good luck with the reinstall – while I typically would rather salvage a system than wipe it, it sounds like you need to start over.

    As far as recovering from a RAID failure is concerned, in my experience you can’t take anything as being written in stone. Each situation can and will likely vary.

    While some people claim the odds of a RAID failure during a RAID 5 rebuild is up to 50%, I have not seen that with my own eyes as of yet. That is not to say the concept does not have a high degree of plausibility. Assuming you have three drives built by the same manufacturer in the same plant, most likely from the same batch, and most definitely with the same mean time to failure ratings the chances of something going wrong is relatively high. You could mitigate the issue by trying to obtain drives from different manufacturers, batches, etc. but again you are just rolling a different set of dice.

    However, to play devil’s advocate, I used to have a pair of Iomega NAS devices under my watch that used a 4-disk Windows software-based RAID 5 configuration (Don’t ask me why…someone at Iomega must have thought this was a good idea). If these devices were forcefully powered down, due to a hang or the like, they would assume a disk had gone bad and would complete a full rebuild upon reboot. I am not kidding you, I wish I was. This situation occurred at least a dozen or so times per server and I never had a disk failure.

    At this point in the game with storage getting so cheap, I might go the route of RAID 1 for redundancy while keeping some sort of backup on hand as well. A license for Acronis comes pretty cheap, but the peace of mind is priceless. Personally I actually run RAID 0 for my OS disk, which also contains all of my documents, pictures, etc. I do a weekly backup with Acronis to a second disk in my system and then periodically copy that image to a portable HDD that I keep elsewhere. It’s not bulletproof, but unless my hard drives fail and my house burns down taking my office with it, I’m pretty safe.

    Good luck with the reinstall!

16. 
    caslaw, on March 27th, 2009 at 5:23 pm Said:

    Doc:

    Thanks again for your lengthy response. Something is afoot, to be sure, I brought the 3 raid 5 drives into my office and hooked them each up to my vista 32 desktop (via this great gadget called DriveWire by Apricorn- powered usb drive adapter) and sure enough, I was able to reformat the drives. Tested all three and are in good shape.

    I have since read that the initialization time on raid 5 can be quite long with ICH9/10R, but there was no indication to me that it was initializing. Finally, I did do a hard power down during the hang, so perhaps the matrix is trying to recover the array on shutdown now? Anyway, I am only a week into this install, so better restart fresh instead of having driver problems out of the gate. Save those for six months from now!

17. 
    caslaw, on March 28th, 2009 at 1:43 am Said:

    Doc:

    Well, now it gets interesting. Brought the 3 500gb drives home. Pulled all drives. Installed 2 500gb drives. Set up raid 0 in the bios, 50 gb partition, 16k stripe for OS. Fresh Vista install, everything seems fine, then hangs right when Vista should hit 2nd restart, same pulse hdd light, no audible hdd activity. After 20 mins, hard power down.

    Faulty motherboard? Specifically, the portion of the ICH10R that handles the raid firmware? IDE seems to work just fine. Seems to hang when it is exiting from a read (as was happening when vista was loading on the single tb drive with raid driver). Wonder if I can flash the ICH10R firmware? I will check to see if others have similar problem. Could be RMA.

18. 
    DrNathan, on March 28th, 2009 at 8:33 am Said:

    That is pretty interesting – I have had issues with Intel RAID controllers in the past, but it has been a rare occurrence. I would try updating the system BIOS if possible then giving it a go. I don’t believe there is any way to directly update the firmware in the ICH chip, but I could be wrong.

    If that does not work, I would have to think it’s time to RMA the board unless someone else has a suggestion.

19. 
    caslaw, on March 30th, 2009 at 10:14 am Said:

    Doc:

    Thanks again for your follow up. Turns out it was the dreaded Vista install hang, solution is to unplug all usb devices (except keyboard/mouse and eject and reinsert Vista dvd at the hang point to force the read of the raid driver.

    Having said that, I still am seeing oddities with the drivers (installing new drivers on existing drives, etc.), so I will check on updating the drivers. BTW, not doing raid 5 at the moment, doing raid 0 with single drives and purchased Acronis. Much better backup utility than Vista. Selective backup, plus zip format! Thanks for the recommendation.

20. 
    DrNathan, on March 30th, 2009 at 10:52 am Said:

    caslaw,

    Bummer about the install hang – I have a bunch of USB peripherals, but that is one issue I have not run into yet.

    Now you mentioned that you are doing RAID 0 with single drives, I take that to mean 2 or 3 drives set in a RAID 0 array, right? Otherwise it’s just a bunch of disks. If you are doing actual RAID 0 just keep in mind that if one disk fails your data is toast – keep diligent backups. I’m glad that Acronis is working out for you as well, I like it a lot.

21. 
    caslaw, on March 30th, 2009 at 3:03 pm Said:

    Doc:

    2 drives in raid 0 + 3 internals + 1 external drive. Yeah, Acronis is great. Got a combo deal on the backup suite plus disk director ($80). OS shadows and select backups already scheduled. Trying to figure out what this “secret partition” thing is – sounds like a partition that windows will deduct from the logical drive (thus unable to reformat)? That could be handy.

22. 
    kp, on March 30th, 2009 at 6:54 pm Said:

    Same happens going from RAID to AHCI !!!

    interesting to find this so timely to my own problems.

    difference is i had a RAID array on my intel raid controller in vista 64, and wanted to return to a single drive. turns out you get an exactly similar symptom.

    after migrating my partition from my RAID 0 to a single drive, i shutdown, removed the RAID drives, and rebooted. On reboot i hit the BIOS and changed the controller from RAID to AHCI. This causes the same crcdisk.sys crash, etc. that you get when going from AHCI to RAID.

    it wasn’t until finding a couple of other posts similar to this one that i thought to kick it back over to RAID, vista booted up fine. 2 days of headache from a BIOS switch, bah!

23. 
    JJ, on March 31st, 2009 at 11:11 am Said:

    Everone, thank you all so very much for this work… Especially DrNathan.

    I was able to get RAID 5 up and running using Intel Matrix Storage Manager Version 8.8.00.1009 on an old vista 64 build, without much problem. On formatting the raid drive, Drive Manger would do an incomplete job as mentioned previously by caslaw. Do a reboot and formatting worked fine.

    But, on reboot when raid is enabled, Vista 64 redetects my DVD burner and all of my hard drives, individually, and two unknown devices. Click cancel on each device and all is well. Let vista search for drivers and I wind up with drives that are replace by strange devices. I have read in another thread that this is because the drivers and not “signed”. Has any one had a similar experience? Or a solution?

    I have also read a post that says change regestry key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE|System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci

    Set value data to 0 (that’s a zero) to enable booting from an AHCI enabled drive.

24. 
    DrNathan, on March 31st, 2009 at 2:03 pm Said:

    JJ,

    If you can get Vista to boot with RAID enabled, I would try installing the newest version of the Intel drivers with the Matrix Manager installer once more.

    Have you double-checked your RAID config in your BIOS? It is strange for the drives to be detected separately if they are configured in RAID 5 – they should show up as one drive since the ICH controller presents them to Windows as one logical unit rather than several.

25. 
    DaveMc, on March 31st, 2009 at 11:47 pm Said:

    DrNathan, you are my freaking hero!
    P.S. @ manny, right clicking on either of the inf files and selecting install does not add the registry entries. (I tried this before creating a .reg file from the text.)

26. 
    DrNathan, on April 1st, 2009 at 5:11 am Said:

    DaveMc,

    Glad I could be of help! Be sure to Digg this if you have an account – it can only help to spread the knowledge!

27. 
    FredB, on April 3rd, 2009 at 5:34 am Said:

    I went back home yesterday evening with 2x new Hitachi 750GB, then configured the RAIDO (Asus P5B-E plus) and … got the Vista BSOD as everybody … set the BIOS back in IDE to boot Windows, run Google a few minutes and was very lucky to find this great tutorial … a few minutes later I started my Vista with my new 1.5TB RAID0, everything worked (and is still working) perfectly.
    Thank you very much DrNathan !!!
    and Hello from France !! :-)

    Fred.

28. 
    DrNathan, on April 3rd, 2009 at 8:16 am Said:

    Fred,

    Hello back from the Midwestern US!

    I am glad you found the site and were able to solve your RAID problem. It’s a very simple fix to a maddening problem. I hope that Intel will reconfigure their application, allowing you to install the drivers before switching to RAID.

    I have RAID configured at home, and I have switched back to IDE mode without any issues whatsoever, so I would assume that all they would need to do is override their installer’s search for RAID hardware.

    Here’s to hoping!

29. 
    Howard, on April 4th, 2009 at 2:31 pm Said:

    Doc –

    OK, I fixed the problem and my system is now in the process of doing a RAID migration to RAID-1. Here’s what happened:

    When I copied the original Registry file text, I don’t think it was in the plain text format you now have above. When it copied originally, it had “smart quotes” and other non-standard characters embedded in it. I noticed it because I went to double-triple-quadruple check the driver version number and thought the close-quote looked strange. I then checked your text able and thought it was now in a different format. Once I loaded the “clean” registry file it all worked great.

    Note: My system had “ControlSet001″ and “ControlSet002″ as well as “CurrentControlSet”. I had originally tried loading the registry file into each of them (by editing the file); When I tried the clean file, the only one I loaded it into was “CurrentControlSet”.

    THANK YOU SO MUCH for your help – it is GREATLY appreciated! I do not understand why Intel does not package this as part of the installation, but if I have an opportunity to do so I will certainly suggest it to them.

    Also, I know many people who have bought this same system and they were all waiting for me to find a solution to the problem before they attempted it on their own. I will be pointing them to this page.

    THANKS AGAIN!

30. 
    HaysDB, on April 5th, 2009 at 2:41 am Said:

    Thank you.

    I changed DriverVersion to 8.8.0.1009 to match what I downloaded from Intel. Don’t know if that was required or not but it sure couldn’t have hurt.

    Under Storage controllers I now see “Intel(R) ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R/DO SATA RAID”.

    Something I’m not sure is correct is that upon reboot drivers were installed for ATA Channel 0 and 1, and under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in Device Manager I now see ATA Channel 0 and ATA Channel 1. This strikes me as odd. Is this the expected behavior?

31. 
    DrNathan, on April 5th, 2009 at 1:14 pm Said:

    Howard,

    I am glad things finally worked out for you. I apologize for the “magic quotes” and such in the initial posting – I had not noticed that, and someone pointed it out to me after the article was up for some time. Thanks for spreading the word to your friends who purchased the same system!

    HaysDB,

    There are actually a few other lines that change when Intel changes the driver version, including some hex values for the Driver Date and such. I don’t think that these changes inherently alter the way that the driver works or installs, but it may affect whether or not Windows sees the drivers as signed. If it installed for you and you are no longer getting a blue screen, that’s great news! If you want the updated .reg file for the new 8.8.0.1009 drivers, you can find it in my update post here: http://drnathan.teamhackaday.com/2009/03/27/follow-up-how-to-enable-intel-ich-raid-after-installing-windows-vista/

    As for the storage controller listings in your Hardware Manager, the three new values you see (Intel(R) ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R/DO SATA RAID, ATA Channel 0, and ATA Channel 1) are all normal. My system was a clean Vista install with RAID enabled before I loaded the OS, and I have the same items in my Hardware Manager. I think that you now see the new ATA channels listed as Windows sees them in a different way while RAID is enabled. Everything looks normal from here!

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33. 
    GM, on April 16th, 2009 at 4:27 pm Said:

    I love you! :)

34. 
    Jim, on April 28th, 2009 at 2:36 pm Said:

    I just wanted to add my thanks for this wonderful solution. After exhausting all other options, I found this solution and it worked like a charm! :crosses fingers:.

    While it’s difficult to believe that this is the best way, it seems that it is. Thanks again for your hard work! Due to the new versions of the Intel MSM available (8.8.0.1009), I modified the registry file above, but other than that it was smooth sailing.

    For reference: Vista 64 Ultimate, Gigabyte X38-DS4 motherboard.

    Thanks again!

35. 
    DrNathan, on April 29th, 2009 at 7:14 am Said:

    Good deal Jim, I’m glad it worked out. It’s too bad my other post on the topic (with the update registry info) is not as popular, it could have saved you some time.

    I too am baffled that Intel does not modify their application to allow driver installation with RAID disabled. I can switch between RAID and IDE modes on my motherboard without issue with RAID drivers installed, so clearly the drivers can be installed even when running in IDE mode.

    Hopefully they will change this behavior in the future!

36. 
    Dave, on May 12th, 2009 at 2:02 pm Said:

    I’ve been looking for a solution such as this. My problem is that my mobo is older and has an E7525 chipset and ICH5R controller. Can this be made to work for Vista ultimate 32bit?

37. 
    DrNathan, on May 12th, 2009 at 2:21 pm Said:

    Dave,

    I am not 100% positive the above registry changes will work for sure, as they seem to be geared towards ICH8 and newer, but you could give it a shot.

    One solution, albiet a long, roundabout one, would be to throw any spare hard drive you have laying around into your computer, and installing Vista on it with RAID already turned on. Once you get the base Vista install finished, install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager tools and look for the keys above to get the proper values for your particular chipset.

    Even better, you could simply export the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE portion of the registry both before and after the Matrix Storage Manager installation, and use a program like WinMerge to check out the differences between the two files. Those registry keys that differ will likely be all you would need to import into your existing Vista installation to stop the BSOD cycle.

    Let me know how you make out. If you are able to pull off the alternate install and get the registry differences put into a file, please feel free to post it here in the comments to give others with an ICH5 chipset a hand.

38. 
    Dave, on May 12th, 2009 at 6:16 pm Said:

    Thanks for the fast response. I think I’m in a quandry in that, I don’t think there’s an Intel Matrix Storage Manager version that supports both ICH5R and Vista.
    From searching on the Intel site, I think the last version to support ICH5 is Intel Matrix Storage Manager ver. 5.5, which doesn’t support Vista.

    My motherboard is a Supermicro X6DA8-G2. I’ll try your spare drive approach and post back.

39. 
    DrNathan, on May 13th, 2009 at 8:25 am Said:

    Ah, I was not aware that there was not a version of IMSM tools for the ICH5 chipset under Vista.

    I suppose the spare drive approach could still work, provided the current IMSM tools support ICH5 as well. I would install Vista, and try installing the tools – IMSM is pretty particular as you have no doubt found out, so it should tell you right away if there are no qualifying hardware components present for its installation.

40. 
    Dave, on May 13th, 2009 at 2:11 pm Said:

    Well, I’m running on a fresh install now. Enabled RAID in bios prior to installation. The install stopped and asked for drivers for my sata Raid which I provided, (iastor.sys ver. 5.5.0.1035) Install continued without a hitch. And I was able to install IMSM ver. 5.5 with no problem.

    I guess after I analyze the registry, I will restore my original installation and see if I can get IMSM to install after I tweak the registry settings and place iastor.sys in the system32 folder.

    I don’t currently see an option in IMSM to create a RAID 1 array, only a RAID 0. (there are two SATA drives attached) I’m assuming I’d need to change the settings in the RAID bios to tell it to create a RAID 1 array.

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42. 
    Richard Strader, on May 22nd, 2009 at 8:35 am Said:

    Thank you for a brilliant hack. I wouldn’t have re-installed Vista, I would have lived with half speed and wondered when I would need to re-install Vista and then get my RAID back. You should be able to install hardware RAID from within windows and rebuild it there. You made it possible, I appreciate your good work.

    I’m getting 197 MB/sec reads on my two Seagate 7200.12 1TB drives as opposed to 103 for one. The old Fuji SAS RAID which was 15k RPM was only giving me 180 reads and sounded like a blender and failed on top of that!

43. 
    Darren Gale, on May 22nd, 2009 at 10:51 am Said:

    Thank you. This solution saved me days of pulling my hair out. May have taken most of the day googling to find this, but well worth it. Had a customer decide he wanted to add another hard drive in and raid the system (JUST FOR FUN). He’s gonna be happy now. I hope I never see the PC ever again though.

44. 
    DrNathan, on May 22nd, 2009 at 12:32 pm Said:

    Richard, Darren:

    Glad to be of help!

45. 
    Tony, on May 28th, 2009 at 10:33 am Said:

    Thank you so very very much for posting this. I had already spent days trying to resolve this. The driver was already there and matrix had installed ok but windows crashed on start up. All I had to do was add your registry info and problem solved in ten seconds.
    I am very gratfull that you took the time to put this on the web.
    Kind regards
    Tony

46. 
    DrNathan, on May 29th, 2009 at 9:05 am Said:

    Tony,

    Awesome, I’m glad I could help. Really the reason why I took the time to post the information was to save people like you the time and headache of reinstalling the OS, etc.

    I spent a lot of time at my client’s location before stumbling across this information elsewhere. I figured it couldn’t hurt to add to it and put it out there for all to see, especially if it could save someone else a bit of time.

47. 
    grishkafool, on June 1st, 2009 at 5:27 pm Said:

    I tried your system out and am stumped at step 2. It doesn’t appear that there is an iastor.sys file on my HDD. Nor is there a WinAll folder, nor is there a IIF2 Folder in my \Windows\Temp folder- just a bunch of cabs. Any advice?

    I downloaded IATA88ENU.exe from the Intel site, double clicked it, it failed stating that my system didn’t meet the requirements (as your post stated it would) but then nothing.

    Thanks

48. 
    DrNathan, on June 2nd, 2009 at 4:43 am Said:

    grishkafool,

    By chance, do you have explorer set to show hidden files and folders? How about the “Hide protected operating system files” setting? Is it enabled?

    I would think that the files are probably there, but that you can’t see them due to the hidden files setting.

    If not, I can start the installation on my machine, see if I can zip the required files and post them here.

49. 
    grishkafool, on June 2nd, 2009 at 8:38 pm Said:

    Yes, I just confirmed in Folder Options that Show Hidden Files and Folders is selected and Hide Protected System Files is deselected. Under the Search Tab I selected the Do Not Use Index, thinking that that might do a more thorough search. A user named Majkel from the VISTAx64 forums is going to mail me a copy of iastor.sys. But, if you don’t mind, I would happily try out a zipped file from you, if you have the time.

    Thanks.

    Still boggled why I don’t have the folders or files that everyone else seems to have, could it have anything to do with this being an OEM installation (that I ppurchased and installed to save a few bucks)?

50. 
    DrNathan, on June 4th, 2009 at 12:51 pm Said:

    grishkafool,

    I fired up Vista x64 in a virtual machine and tried installing the drivers, knowing the installation would fail since no RAID hardware existed in the VM. The Intel installer will notify you of the installation failure with a dialog box – after you close this box, it deletes the IIF2 folder.

    What you need to do is start the installation, and while everything is unpacking, open Explorer and navigate to C:\Windows\temp. You should now see the IIF2 folder there. Wait for the Intel application to attempt installation, and before you click “OK” to close the error message, make a copy of the IIF2 folder. Once you click the “OK” button, the installer will remove the original folder, but you are still left with your copy. Rename it “IIF2″ and follow the rest of the instructions. After that, you should be good to go.

    Good luck!

51. Sata II xfer rates EP45-UD3P - Page 2 - TweakTown Forums, on June 4th, 2009 at 4:51 pm Said:

    [...] Thanks to Dr. Nathan at team hackaday, and Majkel at the VISTAx64 forums. Here is a link to Dr. Nathan’s Fix. __________________ [...]

52. 
    grishkafool, on June 8th, 2009 at 6:39 pm Said:

    Thanks, Doc!!! Now using AHCI for hot swapping while I ponder on which RAID I want to configure….

    Oh, I hope you don’t mind that I made a post (or 2) regarding your solution; giving you the credit, of course. Funny that it ended up getting shown here above me…^^^

53. 
    DrNathan, on June 9th, 2009 at 5:06 am Said:

    Glad I could help!

54. 
    DaveyB, on June 11th, 2009 at 5:30 am Said:

    Thank You sooooooooo much .. I was driven mad by this after getting my brand new 1TB X 3 drives to build a RAID5 array

    .. I spent 3 hours and was befuddled .. what a terrible driver from Intel than you cannot install it without enablling it .. (incidently when i tried installing the 64bit package on my 32 bit laptop .. it installed without a problem .. even though there are no raid features etc .. ) it loads on laptop and says all drives are fine lol ..

    Next day came to work and just seemed to find your post in 5 minutes after hours googling the night before

    .. I have a Gigabyte ex58 extreme with 64 bit vista and at first I tried your way but my drivers were the old version (that came with motherboard )

    so I looked again and read your updated post for the new drivers and followed that and bang it was working :))) I could have kissed you when I saw vista load and NOT blue screen of death at the usual point .. :)) lol ..

    My raid 5 drive was built after 9 hours ..

    People like you who share such useful information are what mades the internet tech community what it is

    Many Thanks Again

    DaveyB

55. 
    DrNathan, on June 11th, 2009 at 2:13 pm Said:

    DaveyB,

    I am glad that the article helped you out so much.

    I myself have learned more information than I can ever imagine from people who share it for the sake of sharing it online. I believe the old saying goes, ‘If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”, which is so true.

    As long as we share and share alike, we can all progress.

56. 
    Barry Bahrami, on July 11th, 2009 at 11:15 am Said:

    You just saved me a lot of time and money. THANK YOU

    One note…there is a glitch in the way the browser is presenting the registry code to be entered. the first line:

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\PCI#VEN_8086&DEV_2822&CC_0104]
    “ClassGUID”=”{4d36e97b-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}”

    The & (& a m p ;) I have listed it with spaces betwen the characters so the browser does not change what I am typing

    the amp; should be deleted so it’s just an ampersand character

    thanks again for this fix. much appreciated

57. 
    Jero, on July 14th, 2009 at 5:31 am Said:

    Hi DrNathan,

    Just another thanks for your efforts and kindness for sharing this tip! I’m so happy I didn’t have to reinstall my OS since switching on my raid controller! You’ve made my day!

    Champion!

58. 
    DrNathan, on July 14th, 2009 at 12:25 pm Said:

    Barry,

    I had not noticed the improper ampersands there, it must have been from when the article was first posted and I did not have it in its own code block. Thanks for pointing it out, it should be fixed now.

59. 
    Keith T, on July 21st, 2009 at 1:29 pm Said:

    Doc – I know you’ve been inundated with accolades for this tip, but I HAD to add to the pile. This posting kicked butt – saved me hours of work. Great work – you are my uber-tech of the year. Thanks again! …Keith

60. 
    Morten, on July 22nd, 2009 at 2:22 pm Said:

    Second the last post. Complete lifesaver!

61. 
    DrNathan, on July 22nd, 2009 at 2:43 pm Said:

    Excellent Morten, glad to help you both you and Keith!

62. 
    Jordan, on July 24th, 2009 at 4:09 pm Said:

    Thank you so much. This worked perfectly on my Windows 7 x64 system and saved me a ton of time.

63. 
    Peregrinus, on July 30th, 2009 at 3:41 am Said:

    I’m not sure that this will be a help to everyone, but on my system (Windows Vista Home Premium x64, Intel X48/ICH9R) it was a lot simpler even than DrNathan’s excellent solution.

    I found this Microsoft KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976, which provides a solution for AHCI mode in the same situation, and I was wondering if I could do the same for RAID. Inspired by DrNathan’s post, I performed the same operation on /iaStorV, and it worked perfectly. (If your version of Vista didn’t install this key itself for whatever reason, then of course DrNathan’s solution will still work!)

    To avoid ambiguity, the procedure was:
    Run regedit
    Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorV
    In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
    In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.

    With thanks to DrNathan and Microsoft. ;)

64. 
    Peregrinus, on July 30th, 2009 at 3:46 am Said:

    I should probably add that once Windows had loaded successfully, I installed the Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver using the automated setup.

    My apologies for the double post, and thanks again.

65. Follow-Up: How to Enable Intel ICH RAID After Installing Windows Vista | The Dr's Office, on July 30th, 2009 at 7:19 am Said:

    [...] How to Enable Intel ICH RAID After Installing Windows Vista Many people seem to have found my original post about enabling ICH RAID after installing Vista quite helpful, so I thought it would be worth adding a follow-up post to add a few [...]

66. 
    DrNathan, on July 30th, 2009 at 7:25 am Said:

    Peregrinus,

    Nice solution, I had skimmed that article in the past and it never occurred to me to try disabling the iastor driver there, mostly because I had assumed that the driver had not been installed.

    Since it looks like MS installs some sort of iastor driver when you set up Windows, changing that registry key makes a ton of sense. I will post an update on the site in a bit to reflect this alternative method of correcting the problem. I will credit you for finding it, of course.

67. 
    Nathan, on August 15th, 2009 at 12:41 am Said:

    Thanks a bunch! I purchased a Dell Studio XPS a few days ago and wanted to add another 1TB drive and setup RAID1. I knew changing from ATA to RAID in the BIOS would hose me if I didn’t have the right driver, but was having trouble getting it installed. Your tip on getting the driver installed saved me hours of reinstallation and setup. Thanks!

68. 
    Peter JONES, on August 21st, 2009 at 1:52 am Said:

    I HAVE A DEAD SYSTEM BASED ON GIGABYTE P45-DS5.
    It has been dead all summer, the local PC builder cannot figure ho to corret it.
    My machine was first based on P35-DS4 but that totally failed in May 2009, this builder could not find a replacement apparently it is not made anymore, so recommended rebuild on this P45 based board. He built 4-disk internal SATAII RAID0 volume on he ICH10R controller and put 150Gb Vista Ultimate 64-bit disk straight on the GSATA controlleur along with the remaining 500Gb data disk. So you note Vista was not reinatlled the existing op sys installation was simply plugged into the new board. It seemed to work and they delivered it to my home. All was fine until I realised GSATA controlleur was set in BIOS to RAID1 mode and my Vista install was not RAID1 install so I just changed it back to non-RAID. This caused Vista not to boot. I moved Vista to a SATA controller extension card
    and that did not have enought slots for 2 data disks and and bluray writer so I got an Adaptec controller that was SCSI to SATAII adapter, then Vista would not boot and Vista Repair program aid bad master boot record. Threw out the Adaptec and put in a second 2-port SATAII extension card PCIe. Could not get a stable Vista install, seemed at one time to be stable, started upgrade online from SP0 towards SP2, but the Vista Installer reported lots of failures and eventually got bluescreen of death during a reboot during Vista Updater. Then I started getting “Member Offline” for the ICH10R volume, which by teh way had now been upgraded to include 2 eSATAII disks, same make and model of disk as teh 4 internals but on eSATA connection, and of course I had rebuilt the volume via the BIOS and it had worked for a while. Now every time you rebuild teh volime on restart yo just get told the same thing, all members offline. Basically the machine has been dead all summer 1009, I tried to find a replacement P35-DS’ but there just arenot any and this P45 motherboard is a complete f**kup.
    Any ideas how to make this P45 motherboard actually work please??????

69. 
    Neo, on August 23rd, 2009 at 9:58 am Said:

    Wow !! Thats is really wonderful, Worked for Vista 64 bit, ICH10R , RAID10. Thank you.

70. 
    Chris, on September 3rd, 2009 at 6:32 pm Said:

    Thanks! It all worked great- solving the last problem keeping me from enjoying my newly built system. You da man!

71. 
    marcus, on September 25th, 2009 at 9:43 am Said:

    Was having a problem installing raid on my pc with 2 x 1TB discs whilst windows vista was installed on another. This solved my problems thanks :)

72. Installed 2 caviar blacks in RAID 0 now windows won't boot? (Resets itself) - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net, on October 2nd, 2009 at 5:02 pm Said:

    [...] I fixed it! Piece of cake. A little further googling and I stumbled across this gem, made for vista, but works for windows 7! Sorry to post here without doing enough googling, but [...]

73. 
    Paul, on October 9th, 2009 at 8:01 pm Said:

    Wow – this saved me a ton of time. I didn’t configure RAID when I installed Vista 64 on my computer and didn’t realize it wasn’t easy to just turn on. I imaged my boot drive to a separate disk so that I could set up RAID1 on my boot drive. I then turned on RAID in BIOS and the system wouldn’t boot. I found these instructions and I now have the RAID drivers installed without having to reinstall Vista. NICE!

74. 
    DrNathan, on October 9th, 2009 at 8:28 pm Said:

    Glad to hear it helped you out Paul!

75. 
    Mike, on October 25th, 2009 at 10:24 am Said:

    Thanks Dr Nathan, just tried this in Windows 7 (64 bit) and it worked a treat, instead of 5 hours of misery just downlaoded the latest 64 bit driver from intel (8.9.0.1023), 5 minutes later success…:)

76. 
    Jim, on October 28th, 2009 at 1:03 pm Said:

    Thanks DrNathan. This worked for me also. With one exception, I am able to boot without the BSD but the Raid volume is not displayed in “disk manager” . ( Raid 5 .. 5(1.5tb)). I’m thinking that I might need to tweak the registry to see larger than a 2tb drive. Thoughts?

77. 
    DrNathan, on October 28th, 2009 at 3:16 pm Said:

    Jim,

    What OS are you using?

    Pre-SP1, Windows XP had a limit of 137 GB per hard drive. With SP1, Microsoft enabled 48-bit LBA addressing which allows for a maximum disk size of 144 Petabytes.

    If your motherboard’s BIOS is outdated, that may be a contributing factor as well. Motherboard manufacturers updated their code to enable 48-bit LBA around the same time.

    I would try installing the full Intel Matrix Storage Manager software package if you have not already.

    Additionally, I would double check the RAID configuration in the BIOS to ensure that everything is on the up and up with the array itself.

    Good luck, and keep us posted!

78. 
    Jim, on October 28th, 2009 at 11:40 pm Said:

    DrNathan, Thanks for the quick response. The machine is on vista ultimate SP2 with the most up to date bios. The MB is a Gigabyte one of two that I built last summer. The other has a similar Raid configuration which was enabled prior to the OS being loaded. It works flawlessly. I later decided to build an array on the second machine. I downloaded and installed Intel Matrix Storage Manager 8.9. Tried creating the raid volume in IMSM but the max size allowed was 2047gb. In the Raid Bios, I’m able to create the full volume size ~5500 GB. But once I boot into windows the volume is missing from Disk Manager. If I remove the raid volume from the bios all 5 drives appear indivually. Im guessing the problem might be that the 6th sata drive is the system drive and is listed as a non-raid drive in IMSM. My understanding is that sys drives cannot exceed the 2tb plateau. The other MB had 2 extra sata ports that were ide which I used for system. This one does not have that. So, is it possible that since the system drive is raid controlled the 2tb limit applies for all the drives controlled by raid in the system?

79. 
    DrNathan, on October 29th, 2009 at 10:43 am Said:

    Jim,

    I looked around for a bit, and I can’t seem to find a definitive solution for your issue. Some people state that you should enable “Auto-Carve” or “Auto-Carving” on your RAID controller to bypass the 2TB limit, but I don’t believe that setting exists for the Intel BIOS. Usually you only see that sort of option on higher-end chipsets like those from 3Ware and similar.

    Some people state that you should create a GPT partition instead of an MBR partition to go beyond the 2TB limit. Here is a brief (and old) overview from Microsoft regarding GPT partitions: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT_FAQ.mspx

    Hopefully one of these two solutions will lead you down the right path. Good luck!

80. 
    Jim, on October 29th, 2009 at 2:04 pm Said:

    The volume would need to show up in disk manager before I could use GPT to partition it.

    Thanks for your help.

81. 
    DrNathan, on October 29th, 2009 at 2:49 pm Said:

    You might want to see if you can find it using DiskPart at the command line. It’s doubtful, but it might be there.

82. 
    Jim, on November 2nd, 2009 at 5:38 pm Said:

    DrNathan, Quick note to let you how I solved the issue. The Raid driver was incorrect. Windows detected the Raid controller as an earlier Intel model which had a 2tb limit. So, even though your reg hack corrected the BSD issue, the OS still needed to be reloaded in order to install the correct Raid driver. Once I did that, all was golden.

83. 
    DrNathan, on November 2nd, 2009 at 9:25 pm Said:

    Jim,

    Thanks for the follow-up, I am glad you got it worked out.

    When you say that the driver was incorrect, you mean the driver provided by RAIDFix? If so, can you provide a link to the driver you used?

    I was pretty positive I had the most recent driver, but if not, I want to get it squared away asap.

84. 
    Nathan, on November 5th, 2009 at 8:29 pm Said:

    Thank you so much DrNathan and all the posters. This worked like a charm and saved a huge headache of the endless toil of windows updates and backing up. I actually found this easier than dealing with the RAID setup during the OS install.

    Cheers!
    Nathan

85. 
    Nathan, on November 7th, 2009 at 3:24 pm Said:

    Thanks so much, this solved my problems with Windows 7 64-bit. Installed my windows with the harddrive set to IDE by mistake. Installed Linux but the bootloader failed.

    Worked out that the bootloader required the harddrive to be set to SATA RAID in the bios which in turn broke windows!

    Good work.

    Thanks again!

86. 
    AB, on November 15th, 2009 at 3:17 pm Said:

    you are a genius!

87. 
    Paul, on November 18th, 2009 at 4:22 pm Said:

    Peregrinus – could not get Raid ‘on’ but sorted thanks to simple change in registry. You have saved me a lot of time……cheers.

    I am running Windows 7 64 and GA-EX58 UD5 MoBo and was trying to get Raid 1 storage drives set up……

    Thanks

88. 
    Jamie, on December 16th, 2009 at 6:08 pm Said:

    i spent 4 HOURS looking for a solution, THANK YOU .. YOU ARE GOD!!!!

89. 
    Joey, on December 19th, 2009 at 11:21 am Said:

    Worked perfectly for my Windows 2003 Server installed under IDE on a TYAN S7002 motherboard with ICH10R. Thanks!!!

90. 
    Patchu, on December 26th, 2009 at 9:47 pm Said:

    Oh god this guide was a lifesaver. I didn’t bother reading up on it beforehand, assuming it’d be fairly straightforward. Ended up wasting about 4 hours trying stuff like running the windows 7 repair utility on the installation disk, trying to load the RAID drivers into the windows setup and trying a repair after that, and other such things to no avail.

    Thanks a bunch!!

91. 
    DaveK, on January 4th, 2010 at 11:43 pm Said:

    Thank you!!

92. 
    torin, on January 17th, 2010 at 4:04 pm Said:

    amazing, thank you

93. 
    Harito, on January 18th, 2010 at 5:01 am Said:

    Many thanks for this workaround.

94. 
    Argiris, on January 28th, 2010 at 12:52 pm Said:

    Dr. Nathan, you saved my life!

    Well, not literally but set me free from the pain/agony and frustration that I’ve been facing for 2 days now.

    I was JUST about the re-format and start over, when your registry “hack” did the trick.

    If you ever come by Thessaloniki, Greece I’ll buy you dinner! :o)

    Thanks a lot!

95. 
    DrNathan, on January 28th, 2010 at 1:58 pm Said:

    Argiris,

    Glad to hear it. There’s nothing like getting your computer up and running again.

    If I am ever in Thessaloniki (yes, I know where it is on a map) I will be sure to look you up!

96. 
    Fredrik, on February 6th, 2010 at 5:28 pm Said:

    Amazing!

    I got a bsod after trying to enable raid on my intel dg33tlm motherboard. I already hade the storage manager and iastor.sys installed since I hade the controller in sata mode.

    So I only applied the registry hack and voila! it worked like a charm.
    Thanks alot!

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