SSD RAID 0 and Install of Windows 7 from Upgrade Media

Here's a few problems: SSD upgrade, need a pair of them for enough space, also want a clean install of Windows and only have upgrade media. How do we accomplish this? In a word, hacking.

Step one: Have to install an old copy of Windows without RAID drivers. I set the BIOS to AHCI mode, installed one SSD, then installed a copy of Vista x86 I found at the bottom of an old box.

Step two: Got that up and running just long enough to launch the Windows 7 Setup from inside Vista. Did a standard installation of Windows 7, still in AHCI mode on a single SSD. Activate with Microsoft and then it's time to figure out how to get this RAID functioning.

Step three: Install the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers from the Intel website. A future release will support TRIM, but for now I'm not worrying about the potential write delays. I bought the SSDs for their read speed (get BF3 load times down). Reboot.

Step four: Fresh start, Intel RST shows SSD and DVD drives just fine. There is a registry key that can be flipped to switch the iastor drivers from AHCI to RAID mode. The trick is that it will break the RST utility in Windows, and the change in BIOS to RAID mode is the only way the system will boot after that (Short of maybe System Restore). Found this info here: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1587/4/

• Exit all Windows-based programs. 
• Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER. 
• If you receive the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue. 
• Locate and then click one of the following registry subkeys: 
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetServicesMsahci 
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetServicesIastorV 
• In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify. 
• In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK. 
• On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor. 

Step five: As mentioned before, the GUI utility will no longer work properly. Specifically it does not show drives detected anymore. A quick reinstallation of the RST package from earlier will take care of this.

Step six: Install the second SSD, but do not set this up in the pre-boot RAID utility (Ctrl-I). Let the system continue on to boot up in Windows. In the RST GUI, you will now have the ability to make an array of the available SSDs.



This process will take some time, but then after it finishes and the required restart, you will have a working RAID 0 of the SSDS.

Conclusion: I also am making use of a conventional drive for storage. For Documents, Music, and Video, just go to the properties of each and change the location to a folder on the conventional drive. In my case, I already had a folder for each containing my backup folders. You will be prompted to copy any existing files to the new location and it will merge them with any files and folders already there.

Windows Backup

Suggested moving away from FBackup to the native Windows Backup utility.  Turns out that FBackup was taking nearly two weeks to backup our 1TB of data.  This is because it was set to compress all files into a ZIP archive stored on a USB 2.0 RAID 5 Lacie drive.  Decided finally to just make the jump.  Nuke the external, running with no backup now. Turn on Windows Backup.  600GB of unaddressable space on the external.

Turns out, if you want to use a hard drive larger than 2TB as your backup drive, you will need Windows 2008 SP2.  This is because of a limitation with the VHD file that is created and hidden from you.

This took me days to figure out, but in the meantime I've got the FTP server up to current patch levels rather than 2009 when the last updates were run (please kill me).  Now we have a month's worth of backups, incremental and bare metal restore capability, and volume shadow copy and previous versions giving us fine grained control over file restoration.

I am a golden god.

How to repair a dead hard drive on a Dell PERC6i RAID

1. Curse God for choosing the FTP server to throw a drive.
2. Thank God for waiting to kill said drive until after your brilliant backup solution had been operating perfectly.
3. Pat yourself on the back for running a RAID5 so everything keeps chugging.
4. Convince Dell that you know grinding noises mean drive death (this took 2 minutes, they really do a good job).
5. Explain to office dwellers that the server is okay running without a face or #2 drive and flashing status display until the new drive arrives tomorrow.
6. Fight the PERC config utility for 45 minutes and several reboots trying to find how to make the new drive part of the old RAID.
7. Kick yourself when you discover that marking the new drive as a Hot Spare instantly causes it to be absorbed by the degraded RAID.
8. Allow an hour or two for the RAID to rebuild.
9. Breathe.