Wirehead Studios

Well RAID arrays are nice, but they can be temperamental as I've recently discovered.  Something as simple as swapping out a motherboard can cause problems.  I got everything physically installed, and go to boot into Windows XP.  All looks well, the Windows XP logo comes up, then I get a BSOD with STOP:  0x0000007b.  It turns out that the Silicon Image RAID controller on my replacement board is a slightly different revision.  My old board was revision 1.02, the new one is 1.04G.  Windows XP did not recognize the Mass Storage Controller (The RAID controller) on boot.  Of course, the answer is simple enough:  Install the driver for the RAID controller.  But, how do you do that if you can't boot into Windows to install drivers?

Sometimes it's nice having an alternate boot on an IDE hard drive.  I booted into my "emergency" drive, the one I use for this sort of thing.  I attached my old 160 GB SATA drive and used the Clone Disk feature in Acronis True Image to clone the RAID volume onto the alternate SATA drive.  I then booted onto the non-RAID SATA drive, and Windows loaded normally and picked up all the new hardware.  In went the driver disk, and now I had the correct RAID driver installed.  I then booted back into my "emergency" drive, and clone the non-RAID SATA drive onto the RAID volume.  Change the boot order back to the RAID volume, and I could then boot into Windows XP.

One extra piece of advice:  Make sure you detach the stand-alone SATA drive before booting onto the RAID volume.  I ran into a glitch that caused a log on-log off loop state (THANKS A LOT SVCHOST and EXPLORER FOR CRASHING!).  After many failed attempts to fix it per the known "working" methods, I resorted to copying my system folders from the known working SATA volume onto the RAID volume while booted from my "emergency" drive.  I detached the stand-alone SATA volume and I've had no problems since.  Copying the system files over was the only thing that fixed the winlogon problem.  None of the "known" fixes out there worked, including the official ones from Microsoft's Knowledge Base.  So yes, it is a damned good idea to clone your drive onto a backup drive before swapping out hardware.

If you ever want to install a RAID volume for either striping or redundancy, hopefully the above is helpful to you if you decide or need to swap out a system board or controller.  It takes time and patience to complete, but it beats a reinstall of Windows.  There might be other ways around this using the Recovery Console, but I could not find any good ones.  So... now I'm up and running with my RAID array working perfectly, a complete backup of all my files, and some new knowledge about the headaches of how Windows interacts with SCSI controllers.

One side note and here's the RANT part:  I don't know if this sort of thing happens with Vista or Windows 7, but I'd think that some genius at Microsoft would realize that people upgrade their hardware and that RAID volumes are usually there because people DON'T want to lose their stuff.  Instead of just throwing a BSOD fault, why the hell could you not have the option to do a text install of a third-party mass storage volume driver?  If you can do it from the setup disk you could do it on boot if a volume load failure occurs.  Then you could just plug in a floppy (or USB or CD or whatever), pull the driver over, and realize where the rest of the freaking OS is sitting and boot.  Bombing to a BSOD due to a mainboard or SCSI controller change is really, really shoddy programming.  It's pretty bad when a mere bird catches something a freaking software engineer should have seen during alpha-phase development!

Or you could insert a boot cd with a mini winxp on it and install the raid controller drivers works mostly for me.

I'm very much interested in knowing how to do this.  Do tell, or link?

http://www.ubcd4win.com/ build your own boot cd with this (Using bartpe to slipsteam an XP installation on to the CD). once done load the windows part of it and there are already some tools for fixing masstorage controler driver "Fix_HDC" havent tried the new fix_hdc yet only used the old but saved ourskin a couple of times after moving over to a new hardware. works only for winxp thought, dunno if the new fix_hdc have support for vista/win7 but i've never had that kind of problem with those OS's.

Looks like a great time saver.  Thanks!