my brand new raid will not let me boot!!!

[radeson]

Hello,

I just built a brand new system last Friday and I have been having nothing but problems with it. Things have been fine with it for the most part. There just seems to be a different problem everytime I turn a corner. I have been playing around with some mild overclocks and benchmarks trying to stabilize the system. Tonight I was trying to fix some graphics problems because I kept getting jitters in games. I shutdown the system to switch off three of the four graphics cards and then reinstall the drivers. The motherboard has four switches to allow me to turn off graphics card at will.

after I turn them off and tried to boot up my motherboard would shutdown and reboot itself over and over again until it finaly would boot to an error screen. I never changed any settings or anything but I ended up having to resort back to factory settings. It then did the same thing booting to an error screen saying overclock failed. When I finally got it to boot it went past the post screen and when it would usually roll the windows loading screen it had a flashing cursor in the upper left hand corner and then it would flash diagonally down 6 inches towards the middle of the screen and then back and forth again multiple times. Then it would just kick me back into BIOS. I was able to boot up into windows from an old hard drive from my old system.I tried clearing CMOS and switching multiple settings around with no overclocks and then even tried some mild overclocks with no luck I was not able to boot up into my 4 Way raid 0. I obviously have Intel Rapid Storage Technology and I have for Samsung 850 Pro. I need help and I feel like blowing my head off I want to send this motherboard back. When I first turned it on last Friday it proceeded to boot and shut itself down over and over again for about 5 times. It has done this multiple times when starting up and I just figured at first that it was just a function of this motherboard. If anybody can help me out please help. Does anybody know if the Asus Rampage 5 motherboard does this to anybody else. I am very concerned about losing my raid I had spent the last 4 days perfecting or at least trying to get windows in order. I am actually more concerned about the behavior of this motherboard and whether or not it is normal for it to shutdown and reboot itself like that.

 

[mindbomb]

you forgot to set the sata controller to raid mode when you reset the settings.

 

[radeson]

Nope not it. I tried doing a boot over ride also. That didn't work. Oh wait, this is weird, I just clicked boot override like 5 times for the raid. I got frustrated and clicked the old system's windows and somehow it booted to the raid. After it kicked me back to bios 4 times... Wtf. I don't dare restart until I figure it out. I'm going to run virus scans and try to make a hard copy of the drive....

 

[mrpiggy]

My suggestion would be to lose the booting from RAID0. 4xSSD's in RAID0 as the "system" disk, gains you next to nothing in real-world performance compared to using one of the SSD's as the boot/system disk, and having the other 3 SSD's as a separate RAID with all the apps/games installed on it if game or app performance is what you are looking for. When a system with SSD's gets an unexpected reboot/BSOD/etc, on the next boot, the SSD has to correct its internal table data problems caused by the crash/BSOD/whatever. Not that big of a deal with a single SSD. Having 4 in RAID with other things that have to be checked like RAID parity on top of the all the SSD's all internally correcting themselves at the same time after some sort of crash-caused corruption, can cause problems like you see where the drives aren't responding fast enough during the boot initialization process. Sometimes, letting them sit a while while powered on, then a reboot will give them time to sort their internal stuff out and the system ought to boot.

You have a nice system, but there is really nothing to be gained by the 4 SSD's in RAID0 as the "boot/system" disk, but a whole lot of negatives. If you DEMAND a RAID0 boot/system disk, then stick with 2 of the SSD's on the Intel controller. Performance increase after 2-3 SSD's is garbage anyway on a RST RAID. It is not a true "hardware" RAID controller and the demands of keeping the 4 drives RAID synced comes from the CPU. If you can afford to build your fancy a system, then you can afford a real hardware RAID controller that takes the load off the CPU in controlling the RAID.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

My suggestion would be to lose the booting from RAID0. 4xSSD's in RAID0 as the "system" disk, gains you next to nothing in real-world performance compared to using one of the SSD's as the boot/system disk, and having the other 3 SSD's as a separate RAID with all the apps/games installed on it if game or app performance is what you are looking for. When a system with SSD's gets an unexpected reboot/BSOD/etc, on the next boot, the SSD has to correct its internal table data problems caused by the crash/BSOD/whatever. Not that big of a deal with a single SSD. Having 4 in RAID with other things that have to be checked like RAID parity on top of the all the SSD's all internally correcting themselves at the same time after some sort of crash-caused corruption, can cause problems like you see where the drives aren't responding fast enough during the boot initialization process. Sometimes, letting them sit a while while powered on, then a reboot will give them time to sort their internal stuff out and the system ought to boot.

You have a nice system, but there is really nothing to be gained by the 4 SSD's in RAID0 as the "boot/system" disk, but a whole lot of negatives. If you DEMAND a RAID0 boot/system disk, then stick with 2 of the SSD's on the Intel controller. Performance increase after 2-3 SSD's is garbage anyway on a RST RAID. It is not a true "hardware" RAID controller and the demands of keeping the 4 drives RAID synced comes from the CPU. If you can afford to build your fancy a system, then you can afford a real hardware RAID controller that takes the load off the CPU in controlling the RAID.

+1 and :thumbsup:

I think he's using an "E" processor and a Rampage board? There's nothing wrong with a feature-rich motherboard, but it's the gung-ho strategy (if you can call it that) which does us all in. He isn't really "finished" building the system, and its complexity is pushing him "off the main highway" and into "detours."

Start simple. Make simplicity a principle. Even if RAID0 is "part of the plan," I'd suggest testing the hardware with a single boot drive -- RAID-mode would be fine -- before moving forward. REmember: You don't have to use all the features of the hardware: they're provided as "options."

And I agree about the light-speed ambitions for SSDs. No need for RAID0. More expensive; more complex. Two would suffice -- if that. Think of the difference between the speed of an Alpha particle and a photon. He might be better off with a RAM-caching solution and a single SSD. That may be "more complex," but it's still "simpler."

 

[Essence_of_War]

What troubleshooting (other than clicking boot override) have you tried so far?

Have you tried booting a live linux distro?

Have you tried installing windows onto a single SSD and booting just that?