Windows wont recognize my raid array

[guitarshredder84]

Not sure where to put this question so please forgive me.

 

Hello fellow master racians!

I recently purchased 2 250 GB 850 evo’s to go along with my 250 GB 840 evo, and an upgrade (fx8350) to replace my fx 6300. CPU swap went without a hitch, but the problem I’m having is that I can’t get my windows (both 8.1 and 7 installation drive selection as well as 8.1 in OS device manager) to see my raided drives (3 total). I want to do a fresh install of windows 8.1 because my current OS has app issues and there is no fix other than reinstalling windows. Nothing I have tried so far lets me even see the raided drive in windows. I CANT EVEN RAID BROS!!!

 

My Stuffs:

MOBO M5A97 R2.0, FX 8350 2x 250 GB 850 evo’s and 1x 250 GB 840 evo, I think that’s all that is relevant if there is anything else that matters I will list that as well.

 

Things I did:

Swapped my CPU, turned PC on and ran prime 95 for about 10mins to make sure temps and chip was good, installed the new drives to the 1-4 sata slots on my MB so that all my ssd’s are in slot 1-3 with my storage drive and blue ray burner being in 5-6, turned on pc, ran disk checks to be sure the new drive were functioning, (they were) went into bois sata configuration and set it to RAID, saved and rebooted and entered the (forgot the name) screen where you set up the raid drives, I defined all 3 ssd’s to raid 0 with default settings except the fast mode disable because it said it would delete my MBR and I wasn’t sure if this would work and didn’t want to erase my OS for nothing, saved and exited and booted from my 8.1 flash drive, got to the “select drive” part and couldn’t find my raided drives, I hit up the google webs and found out I needed drivers for raid in windows installation, I got the drivers from AMD (asus didn’t have raid drivers for 8.1) but it was an application and not the drivers themselves, I also tried the asus windows 8 raid drivers, as well as the disk drivers that came with my motherboard, they all gave me the “no signed device drivers detected” when I tried to scan for them, but I hit browse, and manually pointed to the drivers to load them, it pauses for a few seconds while the load bar goes across the bottom, then it kicks me back to the drive selection screen, but my raided drives are still not there, so thinking I may need to format them while they were in raid formation I cloned my OS to another hard drive, booted from that one, opened my computer, but ALAS none of my raided drives were present, so I went back to bios, unraided all my drives, booted back to windows and reformatted the two 850’s, then tried everything again (raiding and defining, installing windows 7 and 8.1) except only using the 2 clean 850’s but got the same exact results, bios shows my raid array as functioning, and it is even in the boot menu.

 

I am at a complete loss and don’t know how to get my raid working… PLEASE HALP!! 

[Captain_WD]

Not sure where to put this question so please forgive me.

 

Hello fellow master racians!

I recently purchased 2 250 GB 850 evo’s to go along with my 250 GB 840 evo, and an upgrade (fx8350) to replace my fx 6300. CPU swap went without a hitch, but the problem I’m having is that I can’t get my windows (both 8.1 and 7 installation drive selection as well as 8.1 in OS device manager) to see my raided drives (3 total). I want to do a fresh install of windows 8.1 because my current OS has app issues and there is no fix other than reinstalling windows. Nothing I have tried so far lets me even see the raided drive in windows. I CANT EVEN RAID BROS!!!

 

My Stuffs:

MOBO M5A97 R2.0, FX 8350 2x 250 GB 850 evo’s and 1x 250 GB 840 evo, I think that’s all that is relevant if there is anything else that matters I will list that as well.

 

Things I did:

Swapped my CPU, turned PC on and ran prime 95 for about 10mins to make sure temps and chip was good, installed the new drives to the 1-4 sata slots on my MB so that all my ssd’s are in slot 1-3 with my storage drive and blue ray burner being in 5-6, turned on pc, ran disk checks to be sure the new drive were functioning, (they were) went into bois sata configuration and set it to RAID, saved and rebooted and entered the (forgot the name) screen where you set up the raid drives, I defined all 3 ssd’s to raid 0 with default settings except the fast mode disable because it said it would delete my MBR and I wasn’t sure if this would work and didn’t want to erase my OS for nothing, saved and exited and booted from my 8.1 flash drive, got to the “select drive” part and couldn’t find my raided drives, I hit up the google webs and found out I needed drivers for raid in windows installation, I got the drivers from AMD (asus didn’t have raid drivers for 8.1) but it was an application and not the drivers themselves, I also tried the asus windows 8 raid drivers, as well as the disk drivers that came with my motherboard, they all gave me the “no signed device drivers detected” when I tried to scan for them, but I hit browse, and manually pointed to the drivers to load them, it pauses for a few seconds while the load bar goes across the bottom, then it kicks me back to the drive selection screen, but my raided drives are still not there, so thinking I may need to format them while they were in raid formation I cloned my OS to another hard drive, booted from that one, opened my computer, but ALAS none of my raided drives were present, so I went back to bios, unraided all my drives, booted back to windows and reformatted the two 850’s, then tried everything again (raiding and defining, installing windows 7 and 8.1) except only using the 2 clean 850’s but got the same exact results, bios shows my raid array as functioning, and it is even in the boot menu.

 

I am at a complete loss and don’t know how to get my raid working… PLEASE HALP!! 

 

Hey guitarshredder84,

 

Configuring a RAID requires formatting all drives that are going to be in the array and thus losing all data on them. You will need to erase those drives in order to do a hardware RAID0 with those drives.

 

Could you post a screenshot of your BIOS settings, device manager and disk management?

 

Captain_WD.

[guitarshredder84]

Thanks Captain_WD. I also assumed that they would need to be formatted so i tried just the two 850's that were brand new and it still didnt work. Is there a special format that is required for raid? do they need to be partitioned? Also I will get those screenshots when my cell battery charges enough to take them.

[Z3R0C00L]

You need to give Windows the AMD raid drivers either at install OR once the os is installed
 

 

Pretty much what this guy does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L--ByVvXqw#t=298

[Z3R0C00L]

Or once windows is installed download this :
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/chipset?os=Windows+8.1+-+64

It will work with WIndows 7 and 8/8.1 64Bit ... and then you should be able to see your raid drive into the windows disk management.
You will probably have to initialise and format the drive

[guitarshredder84]

You need to give Windows the AMD raid drivers either at install OR once the os is installed

 

 

Pretty much what this guy does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L--ByVvXqw#t=298

installing drivers on windows installation does nothing for me

[guitarshredder84]

 

Hey guitarshredder84,

 

Configuring a RAID requires formatting all drives that are going to be in the array and thus losing all data on them. You will need to erase those drives in order to do a hardware RAID0 with those drives.

 

Could you post a screenshot of your BIOS settings, device manager and disk management?

 

Captain_WD.

 

This site doesn't allow pics larger than 2mb and all mine are like 7mb lol and when I re-size them they are crappy if you could recommend a workaround I will try it 

[Captain_WD]

This site doesn't allow pics larger than 2mb and all mine are like 7mb lol and when I re-size them they are crappy if you could recommend a workaround I will try it 

 

Try uploading them to another wesite and simply post the link here (http://imgur.com/ should do the job).

 

Captain_WD.

[Z3R0C00L]

installing drivers on windows installation does nothing for me

Have you checked in WIndows disk management if you have a non-initialized disk ?

[Captain_WD]

Thanks Captain_WD. I also assumed that they would need to be formatted so i tried just the two 850's that were brand new and it still didnt work. Is there a special format that is required for raid? do they need to be partitioned? Also I will get those screenshots when my cell battery charges enough to take them.

 

 

Drives will be formatted when the RAID is initialized and will appear as one (for RAID0) whole volume for your OS and you can treat them as if it is a regular drive (formatting and partitioning). 

 

Captain_WD.

[guitarshredder84]

So, I have a bit of an update. I called Asus customer support, and they told me that there wasn't much they could do because the raid was working on a hardware level in the BIOS. Then I called Samsung who blatantly and rudely told me they had nothing to do with RAID and they don't support it nor do they address it. I then remembered I had two old laptop hard drives, so I pluged those up and set them up in raid. They worked just fine without any installation of drivers in Windows setup. They showed up and I was able to start the installation on them, so then I assumed that there was a controller issue and that maybe it wasn't compatible with the 850 Evo or just SSDs in general. I called AMD and they were the most helpful of the three but, they still couldn't figure out the problem so they "escalated" the issue and I'm waiting for a call back or email from them. I would like it if anyone who reads this has an ssd raid on the AMD 970 chipset, please tell me if you had these issues and how you fixed them.

[Captain_WD]

So, I have a bit of an update. I called Asus customer support, and they told me that there wasn't much they could do because the raid was working on a hardware level in the BIOS. Then I called Samsung who blatantly and rudely told me they had nothing to do with RAID and they don't support it nor do they address it. I then remembered I had two old laptop hard drives, so I pluged those up and set them up in raid. They worked just fine without any installation of drivers in Windows setup. They showed up and I was able to start the installation on them, so then I assumed that there was a controller issue and that maybe it wasn't compatible with the 850 Evo or just SSDs in general. I called AMD and they were the most helpful of the three but, they still couldn't figure out the problem so they "escalated" the issue and I'm waiting for a call back or email from them. I would like it if anyone who reads this has an ssd raid on the AMD 970 chipset, please tell me if you had these issues and how you fixed them.

 

 

Sorry to hear about the misfortune with some of the support. I looked around and I found this (http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/samsungssd/downloads/Samsung_Magician_43_Installation_Guide.pdf?CID=AFL-hq-mul-0813-11000170) that says AMD chipset with AMD drivers is not supported by Samsung magician software (page 5). Read through it for more info.

 

You can also look around as they are many threads discussing the issue.

 

Captain_WD.

[guitarshredder84]

Well Im not to worried about the magician software just the hardware

[Captain_WD]

Well Im not to worried about the magician software just the hardware

I would check with Samsung's support if the drive is capable of working on that particular chipset at all without the Samsung Magician software, since it is not supported. It may be the case that the drive needs a firmware update in order to work but it cannot be done without the software. 

 

Captain_WD.