Hopefully not pulling a nerve bumping this old topic.
First would like to congrats the op and all comments for the great thread. Ive done this 5 years ago and it served me greatly, without any problem. Last 3 years, this desktop saw little action, and last week while playing a game, had a BSOD and restart. Windows was loading and pausing, stuttering and I did the worst possible thing, a cold reset.
System was built as suggested by the op, a Z77 MB (gigabyte), OCZ SSD sataIII 128GB, a WD 2TB hdd, os windows 7
cant remember if the acceleration mode was default or enhanced
After the restart windows wouldnt load with a BCD not found error
CTRL-I showed volume 1(cache) as disabled, the rest as expected.
Acceleration option says that there is no volume for acceleration.
Windows repair couldnt find the os, after installing raid drivers, found windows 7, but with 0 size and no location
after bootrec.exe at dos prompt windows begin to load but hangs.
Any tips?
Ive found some pages suggesting changing to non-raid at ctrl-i, but that would make me loose data, wouldnt?
Thanks for reading and any help
Well, you "can't remember," but it sounds more likely that you used "Enhanced." "Enhanced" implements a deferred-writes feature. Even if you've been OCD about hardware perfection and UPS-supported power solutions, that feature still represents a risk, even if it's a lower risk.
Don't you have a backup of your boot-system disk? Hopefully, you could do a bare-metal restoration.
I suppose that I anticipated all these little possibilities among the sieve of possibilities. I have a home server which backs up all the household workstations nightly, and I've probably made four or five bare-metal restorations over the last few years -- some of them simply done to replace a disk with a faster one or higher capacity.
The problem with Intel ISRT caching is the same as that of the Samsung RAPID feature for RAM-caching of a Sammy SSD or the Hyper-Duo solution provided with some Marvell controller chips. It is proprietary to the hardware -- Intel disk controller, Samsung SSD or Marvell controller card.
For 2.5 years, I've been using PrimoCache from Romex Software. The only competitive software product I found came from some Massachusetts outfit -- "SuperCache" I believe it was called. This latter software only allows for RAM caching, even if it is storage-mode agnostic. It doesn't implement any SSD-caching of HDDs, and there is no deferred-writes feature.
Primo is sort of like a Swiss Army Knife of caching configuration. You can set up caching for any SSD, any HDD, either AHCI or RAID storage modes mixed together, and multiple controllers.
I just hope you made a backup of that boot-system disk recently. If you didn't -- live and learn, Bro!