The Dr's Office

Bypass this article and fix your Intel RAID Drivers immediately using RAIDFix

An update to this post can be found here

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 details.

First, some people have suggested that you can simply search for the iastor.sys file instead of navigating to the path I mentioned in the first post.  This should be a fine alternative to manually navigating there, but just be sure to pick the right iastor.sys file.

Second, some people mention that right-clicking on the iastor.inf file located in the same directory as the iastor.sys file gives you an “Install” option.  I have seen that option, and I tried installing the driver in that manner, but it did not  work for me.  Your mileage may vary.

Third, there is the question of ControlSet001 vs CurrentControlSet in the registry entries.  Without getting into too much detail, the CurrentControlSet value in the registry is simply a pointer to whichever Control Set has been loaded by Windows.  For simplicity (and compatability’s) sake, I have changed all entries in the reg file to point to CurrentControSet, rather than to a specific, numbered control set.  More often than not, your system will be using ControlSet001, but that might not always be the case.

Finally, Intel has updated their Matrix Storage Manager software as of 3/13, which means changes need to be made to the registry information in my previous post if you want to install the newest version of the software right off the bat.  If you would rather stick with the slightly older build, you can find it here.

What I decided to do was take a snapshot of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE portion of my registry before and after installing the newest version of the Matrix Storage Manager software to see what values might have changed between versions.  I suppose I can’t say that this is an absolutely bulletproof way of determining what has changed, but it’s a pretty darn good attempt.

Luckily, not a ton has changed – in fact, only one section of the registry file has been altered in the new release.

The second key in the registry file that adds data to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E97B-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0001 key has been slightly altered.  The changes to that section are on lines 2, 5, 6, and 7, which simply denote driver version changes:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E97B-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0001]
"InfPath"="oem9.inf"
"InfSection"="iaStor_Inst_RAID"
"ProviderName"="Intel"
"DriverDateData"=hex:00,00,97,ae,db,8b,c9,01
"DriverDate"="2-11-2009"
"DriverVersion"="8.8.0.1009"
"MatchingDeviceId"="pci\\ven_8086&dev_2822&cc_0104"
"DriverDesc"="Intel(R) ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R/DO SATA RAID Controller"

That’s it – those are the only differences, aside from “Enum” entries that are specific to your computer.

Hopefully this helps some of you looking to switch on RAID in your Vista install.

Grab the NEW registry file here

Grab the OLD registry file updated to reflect CurrentControlSet here

Also, if someone would like to take a registry snapshot of their computer before and after both RAID is configured and Matrix Storage Manager is installed, I would love to see those registry files so I can do a bit of comparison.