Windows 7 on SSD, RAID5 as second Drive, No booting.

[DejaVu]

HELP!

My PC main has fallen over quite badly and I've had to reinstall Windows 7.
Activated SATA Type as RAID, as my D Drive is a software RAID5 with some VERY important information on it.

Loaded the driver as normal and everything starts going through fine. The RAID is even found during setup and looks great (Space Usage etc).
After the first reboot of Windows Setup, it crashes at the pulsating logo and restarts and asking to repair Windows, which obviously fails.

I've checked the RAID is functional and the BIOS reports its working fine.
Disable SATA type RAID and reset to AHCI, Windows boots from my SSD, but the D Drive is obviously missing.

Now, I've got no problem wiping out the RAID, but need some VERY important files from it first (about 200GB).
I've tried viewing using GParted Live, but it won't recognise the software raid served from my motherboard and drives just shown as individual SATA drives - probably because it's a Linux Live Distro.

Any suggestions lads? Desperate.

[reverend]

If you can see it during setup mate then just get it to the point where it sees it and hit Shift +F10 and you'll get a command prompt so you should be able to copy whatever you need through that?

[n00bz0rd2]

Not sure if its the same, but if you installed Windows using IDE SATA type in the BIOS, then after installation changed the BIOS to AHCI, Windows won't boot displaying symptoms similar to what you have mentioned. Any chance this could be the reverse situation of that? Windows has been installed with the BIOS set to AHCI but when booting using RAID type it's crashing.

I know that the Windows registry can be edited to change AHCI settings, so maybe there's something similar for RAID?

[DejaVu]

I think something odds going on with my main board to do with the RAID Controller/SATA/AHCI business. I'm going to look into it and see if I can fi or replace it.

Thanks to reverend's recommendation, I managed to salvage what I needed though!! Cheers.

[Over Carl]

I think I may have had the same problem with a vostro 220 with ich7, set it up in raid mode with a single hd that had the exact same symptoms as yours. Put it back to AHCI and it all worked. Tried loading drivers via usb, slipstreaming etc with no joy. Funny thing is that same pc now only has a raid 1 mirror with 2x750 I got here on the BST and it boots fine in RAID mode.