I just ran into a MAJOR hang on this board which will render it unusable for my build if I can't solve the problem.
My drive configuration is this...
2x Intel 80gb x25 SSDs in RAID-0 (onboard raid)
2x 750gb 3.5" spinners in RAID-1 (onboard raid)
2x 750gb 3.5" spinners in RAID-1 (onboard raid)
1x SATA DVDRW (PCI-E 1x 2-port SATA card)
1x 120gb SATA removable 3.5" spinner (PCI-E 1x 2-port SATA card)
All the 750s and the dvdr are disconnected right now.
When the onboard sata ports are configured as a raid in the bios, it won't boot windows correctly off my backup drive. It keeps rebooting half way through the "starting windows" screen. =( The reason this is a problem is because I back up my raid-0 to a single removable spinner and stick it on the shelf. If the raid dies, I just fix the problem, boot off the spinner, and copy it back over. The backup is a ghost image of the raid. The backup drive doesn't boot fully on the onboard raid -or- the pci-e card. If I set the onboard sata to IDE it will boot the OS fully but that doesnt do me any good because I can't set up the raid to copy it back. =(
All my other boards had no issues with what I'm doing. I've been doing it this way for years.
The only solution I can think of is maybe setting the bios to IDE, booting my backup, finding out what's borked in the OS causing the reboots and "fix" it, set the bios back to raid, booting the "fixed" backup and copy it back to the raid. Then boot the raid (hopefully) and have windows reinstall w/e was preventing it from booting off the single drive. >.< What a headache.
Any ideas?
EDIT - Ok I think I have this figured out. When I first tested booting my backup, I had the 2 SSDs completely unpluged (as if that raid just failed both drives). This left only one drive pluged into the onboard sata ports. Well it turns out, even if the bios is set to raid, when there's less then 2 drives pluged in it disables the bios for the raid controller (the ctrl-I menu where you configure the raids) and won't detect a single drive. I really don't like when something makes decisions like that for me. If I set the main bios to raid I want that Intel bios to come up reguardless. What if it was a 2 drive raid and one actually did fail? Would the bios turn the raid controller off because there's only one drive? I'd rather the raid bios come up and tell me one drive has failed. See the problem here? If the bios is set to raid that intel screen should come up and tell me wtf is up. If there's nothing in the ports it should just say "no drive found" not completely disable the intel raid bios. >.< Morons. Who decided that so I can slap them?
Right now I'm booted off the PCI-E card with my backup. I stick 2 3.5" spinners on the onboard to cause the intel raid bios to turn on. They are just temporary to test what works and what doesn't. Apperently my restarts were caused by the intel raid bios not loading. Now that the intel raid bios loads, the os will boot (off the pcie card anyways). I'm about to see if it'll boot the backup off the onboard controller.
EDIT 2 - I'm now booted off the backup on the onboard ports with the bios set to raid. I'll have to test this one more time booting off the ssd, making a backup, pulling out the ssds and putting something else in there just to keep the raid bios enabled, and try booting the backup again. Needless to say it is totally unaceptable for the intel bios to be automatically disabled when I told the main bios I want it on. Just because it didn't detect more then one drive. It "assumes" it's not a raid so why bother enabling it? Well, um, maybe so I can see the rest of the raid that might be failed?