Setup AMD SATA RAID on Windows 10 System with NVME Boot Drive

[Thavion Hawk]

Hi all. I have a strange problem that when I search for it online comes up with wholly unrelated information.

I am building a Ryzen 7 system on an ASUS Prime B350 motherboard as I have done many times before.

I am using a Samsung 960 EVO 500GB SSD as the OS/Boot device as I have also done many times before.

The problem is this is for a customer and he wants a mirrored set of 2TB HDD...

 

 

So I setup the RAID in the UEFI and installed Windows on the NVME SSD. I couldn't see the RAID Array or

the BD-RW Drive when I did the install but I chucked that up to not having RAID Drivers loaded at install...

Funny enough when I got into windows and went to install the missing RID Drivers, AMD's installer said "NO"

So evidently AMD's RAID Controller can't be Configured, Setup and Installed on a Windows System that is

booted from an NVME Boot Device.

 

So I took the drivers from the extracted AMD Installer and side-loaded them in Device Manager... Still Nothing.

I formatted the system, put the drivers on the Windows Install Flash-drive and tried to install them Pre-Install...

Nothing... WTF?

 

Can Anyone help me here or am I going to have to use a Windows Disk Management based Software RAID?

This is a Windows 10 Home 64bit 1709 with drivers from AMD's website for RAID and Chipset.

 

 

[Bajantechnician]

10 minutes ago, Thavion Hawk said:

*snip*

use windows and open format drive. are the drives showing up there?

[Thavion Hawk]

2 minutes ago, Bajantechnician said:

use windows and open format drive. are the drives showing up there?

The Drives do not show up in Device Manager or Disk Managment in Windows even after loading the Drivers via Device Manager.

And turns out there isn't an option in 10 Home to Mirror HDD's in Disk Manager... So !@#$...

[Thavion Hawk]

10 Pro had RAID 1 and 5 in OS but not Home... I'll try using command prompt and diskpart.

[bfairs]

23 minutes ago, Thavion Hawk said:

 

Probably a long shot, but your HDD's aren't in SATA ports 5/6 are they?

[Thavion Hawk]

Nope. Know what your getting at but no they are not. I've got to hate this situation... I just have to.

[Thavion Hawk]

And I can't create a Windows RAID 1 using a Windows 10 OS install then Import it into the 10 Home Install on the system... Well !@#$...

 

[Thavion Hawk]

I took this to ASUS Support and they elevated it to an engineer. waiting for an email.. if one ever comes.

[Thavion Hawk]

Okay so I did some digging and after reseting the bios to defaults, Rebuilding the RAID and booting back up into the installer I used a usb2 optical drive and the mobo disc, loaded the RAID Bottom, Driver and Config packages in that order and then the RAID showed up along with the NVME Drive. So it came down to a Order of Pre-Load/Installation of the Drivers...

[Rincewind_77]

Hi Thavion Hawk!

 

I have exact the same issue with an MSI X470, a Samsung 970 and two 4TB HDD drives.

 

Maybe I don't fully understand the solution of to problem.

So, you basically started from scratch. (Re-)Configured the Raid - I guess one Array with the SSD and one Raid-1 array with those two HDDs. Right?

After that you started the Win10 installation. And because the drives weren't found you had to install the drivers from the Disc using the external USB DVD drive. Am I right?

And after the installation of RAID bottom, driver and cfg the Windows installation was pretty standard? 

 

I am just curious ... did you ever receive an answer from Asus support engineer? 

 

[Thavion Hawk]

Yeah the workaround was in the end nothing too strange apart from having to load the two RAID drivers in a set order to get the RAID to show up.

As for ASUS Support; I don't recall but it's been so long I forgot about the issue entirely.

When ever possible I use the Windows ADK to DISM any relevant Chipset Drivers into my Windows Install Images, but this was a special one off case.