MA770T-UD3P Rev 1.1 --- serious RAID bug?

[stieber]

Well, here we go. As a minor bug before I get to the real thing --- I noticed that just hitting CTRL-F during BIOS startup is likely to crash the whole thing; apparently you really need to wait until the "press CTRL-F" shows up.

Anyway, I have two disks in a RAID-1 setup. I installed Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit). Yesterday I suddenly noticed that the Array is "critical", and my RAID had turned into a critical RAID and a single-disk JBOD. Took me while to repair --- the BIOS couildn't do anything(), there was no RAID tool anywhere to be found. Finally stumbled across that RAIDXpert thing, and got that to repair the RAID. Which took forever. Shutdown the box and went to sleep.

This morning I turned on the box... and the RAID is critical again, along with a 1 disk JBOD. Sounds familiar, waasn't that the same thing as yesterday? WFT? How am I gouing to use that RAID if it needs to be reparied for hours everry day?

You guys DO know that RAID-1 is supposed be helping with keeping the data safe, don't you? It's not going to do that if it's preferred state is "criticial".

I know this is a Gigabyte forum, but anyone know whether Asus boards work properly? This is basically a killer "feature"... and since I need a few more of these boxes it's kind of "on hold" for now.

EDIT: btw, for some obscure reason, the RAID also moved from LD-1 to LD-2. I wonder whether it will now move to LD-3 ...

[jallis71]

When RAID say it is critical, usually means one drive is bad. LD stands for logical drive. Which by all accounts your LD-1 is the bad drive.Was your WIN7 a clean install or a VISTA upgrade? Are your RAID drivers WIN 7 compatible? I have been using RAID 1 on my MA-790FXT-UD5P with no problems. There are WIN 7 drivers for Gigabytes RAID.

[stieber]

The RAID software doesn't say the drive is bad, it just turns it into a single disk JBOD. In addition, last time I just "reattached" it to the RAID and let it rebuild (which completely writes the whole disk) it accepted the drive with no problems (not much of a surprise, as I don't think the drive is actually bad). I also used it for quite a while without the RAID kicking the drive again.

I suspect it doesn't survive shutdowns... although I have no way to test this right now (I'm still trying to install the system... it's my first Windows 7... so it needs a reboot every now and then, which means I can't just sit around and wait for the rebuild just to see it go critical again tomorrow)

The Windows 7 is a clean install. Much to my surprise it even recognized the RAID setup. I've been installing drivers from the gigabyte website as well, after it kicked the drive for the first time, although I can't really tell whether it's the right thing. Obviously it didn't fix the bug.

The driver, if one of the installs updated it compared to the one that came with Windows 7, came from "motherboard_driver_chipset_amd_7series-v2.0_win7-64_novga.exe" or "ati867_Win7Vista64.zip". I also installed "RAIDXpert2.4.1540.4_X2.exe".

It says I have...

AMD AHCI Compatible RAID Controller    3.1.1540.127
AMD RAID Console (same version, no clue what that might be... haven't found a console)

AMD 1X2 Mirror/RAID1 SCSI Disk Device
And of course the WDC... SCSI Disk Device, which is probably there because of the JBOD

Except for the 2nd drive, things look fine to me.

[jallis71]

Are you booting from the RAID drive? Not a good idea.You should have install the AMD SATA driver and the AMD ACHI driver when the install asked for drivers( preferably the newest from GIGAByte). What brand and model memory are you using? What make and model HD? Have you run the board with XP or VISTA?