Intel RST wizardry causing me a headache
Hola,
TL;DR at the bottom, but the backstory might be helpful.
I recently did a motherboard and CPU swap so that I could start down the dark path of Intel, purchasing an i5-4690k and Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H motherboard and whatnot. At the same time I was running arch linux and everything just worked as it did before without me having to change anything. But alas, I wanted better graphics performance and decided to blow the dust off of my Windows 8.1 retail DVD and license and go back to Billy Gates land.
Anywho, I have three WD Blue 500GB hard drives. They are nearly identical save for one of them had an IDE interface, and I have (for many years mind you) stuck a SATA-to-IDE adapter on it to keep it with the times. I was using these with mdraid on Linux in a RAID 5 configuration and wanted to do the same with Windows. Unfortunately, because Windows has never really had good RAID support I had to use the fake raid crutch offered by the motherboard. That is, I pressed CTRL-I at post, entered the Intel RST raid setup menu and formed the array leaving out my SSD to house the operating system on it. Then popped my DVD in, pressed any key to continue, etc. Then the installer just sat there spinning its orbs of calmness for about 20 minutes until I pressed the reset button. Oddly enough, using AHCI mode instead of RAID mode allowed the install wizard to come up almost immediately.
So I figured I'd just deal with this post install since that set of hard drives won't even be used for hosting the OS. I tried turning the RAID mode back on with the same config as mentioned above, but then Windows 8.1 wouldn't boot. Adamantly refused though there is no problems with the hard drives. Reverting this I can see the three hard drives initialized with no filesystem on them reporting correctly within Windows without AHCI mode on. I tried installing the latest Intel rapid storage tech (RST) drivers and that only made the situation worse. That is, one of the hard drives now comes up as 0GB capacity even though it was reporting properly before and accessible.
So now I've only got two out of three hard drives showing up. Only way to resolve that is to uninstall the RST software. Which is precisely what I tried to do. Then I tried to use a parity enabled windows storage space and that was excessively slow. I have since undid that.
At this point I have the Intel RST software reinstalled and have tried to provoke it to come up as the raid driver in a few ways as mentioned around the internet (registry changes, start in safe mode with raid mode on, etc) but none of it works. I feel the one drive it complains about is probably that one IDE hard drive (which isn't any older than the other two, I should add) and it probably doesn't like my SATA adapter. I really want that redundancy but I don't want to settle for a two drive storage pool and lose almost 450GB of space over it.
TL;DR on a Z97 motherboard (intel platform) I am unable to get Windows to begin installation or, post installation scenario, boot, to/from a non-raid device and also make accessible a raid 5 array for data storage only as Windows will forever spin its wheels at boot until AHCI mode is enabled again. Additionally I cannot find amongst the smoke and mirrors a reason why one drive shows up as 0GB unknown only when the Intel RST software is installed, but not when it is omitted from my configuration. Two of the raid physical disks are SATA, one is IDE with a SATA adapter to make it SATA compatible and this was not a problem before moving from my AMD setup to this Intel one.
This is also a 64-bit setup. If additional hardware details are needed let me know.
Anyone run into anything similar? Thanks in advance for ideas.
