Raid 0 and ssd

A couple of years ago I inadvertently chose Raid 0 instead of Raid 1, when I installed 2 hard drives on my new desktop. Somewhere along the line, I reduced the active partition to 450 GB on this Raid 0 C:

Fearing that my two 1 TB drives are about to bite the dust, I just bought a Samsung 840Pro 512GB SSD. I installed it and migrated My Raid 0 to it.

Samsung comes with program called 'Samsung Magician'. It checks, benchmarks and optimizes the SSD. Once installed, I ran it. The program informed me that AHCI setting is required for drives and that Raid was not supported.

While I had no trouble booting from my SSD once it had priority in my BIOS, I was unable to boot into it when everything was set to AHCI.

Needless to say, when the to Raid drives were set to AHCI, I also could not boot from either of them.

I am now trying to figure out how to undo my Raid 0 drives and put all their stripes into one of them as an AHCI drive.

I would hate to have to buy another 1 TB drive to migrate to, just to then migrate all the data back to one of the now single drives.

Does anyone have a solution of what to do?

Is there another SSD utility program that works on Samsung SSD?

Is there a way to untwist the 2 Raid 0 drives, without moving the data to another drive?

As I said before; all the data is already migrated to the SSD, but can't boot from it.

I also have a 2 TB WD Passport drive on USB3, but don't think I could boot from it, when the raid 0 drives are set to AHCI.

Samsung support said their SSD cannot co-exist with Raid of any kind, and the data on it was migrated to it under raid. I will boot, but only when the bios is set to raid.

Appreciate any suggestions.

 

Hello and welcome to MajorGeeks!

The problem you most likely have is that when you switched from RAID to AHCI in the BIOS of the PC you disassembled the RAID array, thereby destroying it, and effectively wiping the disks clean. Most of the time you can't rebuild the array after destroying it in this way. Sorry!

As for the SSD, booting from it should work as long as the AHCI drivers are loaded in Windows. If not, then Windows will crash whilst attempting to boot. You might also have the problem of the boot sector being located on the destroyed RAID array.

Do you get a blue screen when you attempt to boot from the SSD or does it just fail to boot before Windows?

 

I did not destroy my raid. I can set raid in the bios and boot into my Raid 0 drive, or my samsung ssd, Whichever has boot priority set in the boot order.
Everything works fine.

What I cannot do, is optimize the SSD then because it is incompatible with a system set for raid.

When I totally disconnect my 2 hard drives and then try to boot with my SSD drive set to AHCI, I get a blue screan.

I can set AHCI in the bios, but then cannot boot into the SSD, because it was initiated(migrated to) under raid system setup.

I can set AHCI in the bios and not boot into any of the 2 resulting single drives which were the raid 0, because each has only half the data, because it was striped.

I need to some how set keep the 2 drives as raid 0 and then clone (migrate) their striped content onto 3 another drive, which can then be booted as a single AHCI C drive.

Once achieved I can then migrate from there to my SSD.

 

That's odd as last time I destroyed a RAID in my BIOS it wiped the RAID location data. You must have a better motherboard.

What OS are you running and have you installed AHCI drivers on it? If you have the drivers on the OS it should load.

 

I am running xp. Quad core motherboard. I assume I have the drivers. How can I check?

Some how my ssd must have inherited a some striping format on the master boot record.

It can boot just fine as long as my raid 0 system is booted that way.

 

XP does not natively have any AHCI drivers in it, and if you didn't install them when you installed the OS then you won't have them. You will have to do a forced manual install as the AHCI chip wouldn't have been detected as you had the RAID chip active instead.

If you disconnect the RAID drives and boot from the SSD in IDE mode (assuming you are moving away from the RAID as stated previously) then you can install the AHCI drivers from the motherboard manufacturer's website and reboot in AHCI mode and it should work. If it doesn't, you still have the RAID install to copy over again.