T5400 RAID system installation and configuration

Hello. I also have a Precision T5400 and I just bought a second hard drive to move to a RAID configuration. Unfortunately the system has been formatted and I have not re-enabled RAID when I reinstalled (I will have to reinstall the OS again) and the Intel Matrix Storage Console does not give me the option to add the new hard drive to the RAID volume. Do you know how to access the Intel RAID option ROM? I tried hitting ctrl-i during post but nothing happens. The BIOS is already set to RAID Autodetect /AHCI. Any help would be greately appreciated.

I answered my own question: the BIOS settings must be on RAID ON instead of RAID Autodetect/AHCI. But what does RAID Autodetect means?

tlkent01,

Have you checked your BIOS if there is a RAID option? Looks like from the other reply that there is.

Check if you are currently in 'RAID' mode. If not you will have to switch to RAID in BIOS. This is not as simple as changing the switch in the BIOS but can be done without re-installing your OS. If your already set to RAID in BIOS then it will be much easier. You can install your drives and open your Intel Matrix Storage Manager Console and set your drives to RAID, 2 min, and you can leave any others set to 'non-RAID' by just not changing them. I switched my system to RAID but don't have any drives set to RAID, just wanted the external eSATA to be hot swappable.  From what I have read changing your drives to RAID will likely cause you to lose any data that is on them, not sure but you need to check this before doing it. Check the Intel website and you can find the RAID manual. 

I found the below procedure, to install drivers and switch to RAID without re-installing your OS, on this forum and it worked for me.

Here's what I did to enable AHCI/RAID mode on my computer:

1. Download and save the Intel Matrix Manager driver (from the Intel site or your Computer manufactures site). Make a note of the folder location where you save the driver. 
2. Open up Device Manager, expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controller branch (may be different on your machine)
3. Right-mouse click on either Intel(R) ICH9 Serial ATA Storage Controller (I selected the 4 port, both entries will change after the reboot at the end of this process) entry and select Properties
4. Go to the Driver tab, click the Update Driver button
5. Choose the Browse my computer for driver software option
6. Choose the Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer
7. Click on the Have Disk... button, browse to the location you saved the Intel Matrix Manager driver in step 1 and click on iastor.inf
8. Click OK and select the Intel(R ICH8R/ICH9R SATA RAID Controller driver.
9. Complete the process to update the storage controller driver.
10. Restart the computer and press F2 (or your computers equivalent) to enter the BIOS and enable RAID mode (changing it from IDE)

After the computer starts up in AHCI/RAID, you can install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager Console application (from the Intel site or your Computer manufactures site). You don't have to setup a RAID volume; the Storage Manager Console will show the hard drive as a non-RAID volume. 

Hope this helps, I'm sure there are more informed RAID users here that will offer better answers.

Dave

As far as I am aware it is not possible to create a new RAID 0 volume using a disk with the OS installed without having to completely reinstall the OS. You can however create RAID 0 volumes using the non boot disks, although again all data will be overwritten. This is different to a failing RAID 1 volume where it is possible to replace one of the disks and rebuild the array. Presumably a RAID 5 array will need to be created from scratch as it mixes both striping and redundancy. Bob