Intel 865PE Raid and Vista
Technology December 7th, 2006The machine on which I installed Vista has an SATA RAID 1 array managed by my Intel motherboard’s on-board SATA controller. Unfortunately, the motherboard (a D865PERL) is based on the 865PE chipset, which uses the 82801ER (ICH5R) I/O controller hub for the RAID array, and the ICH5R’s RAID drivers don’t officially support Vista (the next-gen ICH6R does have RAID drivers for Vista).
Fortunately, the last ICH5R-compatible version of Intel’s RAID driver (Intel Matrix Storage Manager 5.5) does work with Vista. Or at least, it works for me. I grabbed the “Floppy Configuration Utility - Intel Matrix Storage Manager” download from Intel’s site, imaged a 3.5″ disk, inserted it during the Vista install, and it’s worked like a champ.
I’m blogging this for posterity as I didn’t find a lot of information when I Googled about this stuff.
UPDATE: Using this driver caused my system to blue-screen two or three times a day. Vista mis-reported the issue to me as a video driver problem, so I didn’t put two and two together. Use this driver at your peril; I’m reverting back to a non-Vista OS on the affected machine as Intel continues to state that the IC5HR is unsupported on Vista.
December 8th, 2006 at 11:43 am
Ah, when I installed the SATA RAID 5 managed on a D874-RUBY with a 920F chipset the 928 x didn’t like the 91023 y, which was a pain in the 455.
December 8th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
Yeah you gotta turn on the THX-1138 flux capacitor first dude.
December 8th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Ben, great to run across you again. I’ve been doing some mash-ups lately and needed some AJAX help and low-and-behold who did I find at ajaxian.com? Great to see you doing so well. I’ve subscribed to your RSS feeds to keep up to date with all you’re doing…
Keep up the great work!
January 16th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Many thanks for this. Just spent 3 hours looking for a solution and was about to give up. Been on the Intel & MSI websites looking for Vista drivers. This is for a MSI 865PE / G Neo2 board.
January 16th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
James: Hey, glad it worked out for you too. Thanks for letting me know.
February 2nd, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Thank you so much for this post, I have also spent hours looking for a SATA RAID driver for my Abit IC7-MAX3 (also 82801ER / ICH5R). My Vista Home Premium should arrive in about 12 hours, so I really hope my Vista experience won’t start with having to purchase a new Motherboard (or more likely an IDE hardrive…)
Cheers again!
February 2nd, 2007 at 9:41 pm
I didn’t spend any time looking for a solution… I wondered if my D865PERL would support RAID in Vista, did a search for ‘vista d865perl raid’, and this page was the first link. Google FTW!
Thanks dude!
Now if Nvidia would only get off their butts and release nforce4 drivers that support RAID - I could upgrade my main system.
February 4th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
D865PERL board, found the RAID driver on the Intel site, Imaged a floppy & worked.
The problem now is to get the integrated sound to fire on all 5 speakers. The SoundMax intel app doesn’t want to load into Vista and now I only get sound from 2 front speakers, and there is no place to change the speaker configuration.
February 12th, 2007 at 6:31 am
and which RAID driver I need for MSI 925 XE MB ?
March 7th, 2007 at 11:26 am
My moyher board is Gigabyte 8i915p and use ich6r too but your driver dosent work on it. can you help me?
March 18th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
I found that you don’t need to boot from floppy during the vista installation, if you right click on the unknown raid controller and search on the disk, it finds it just as well AFTER vista has been installed (if the bios is still checking for it, which I assume it is; keep in mind my raid is my secondary drive), but I still have a “minor” issue
the actual application that comes with the intel raid controller; do I need that? my computer sees the raid properly, I was just wondering if I needed the manager app for anything. otherwise I’ll just hop into…whatever vista uses to format and change drive letters and set it up.
March 22nd, 2007 at 11:20 pm
I am trying it know! hope it works. I also googled it and I could not find nothing I have the D865PERL and i could not load Vista on it.
I am trying your method to see if it works.
Thanks
March 22nd, 2007 at 11:23 pm
Bah it did not work for me! its asking me to select driver to be installed. When I browse to the floppy I get nothing.
March 22nd, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Woohoo Sorry it worked used another floppy! stupid floppys =-) hehe So its the floppys that are stupid ah?
Thanks for your help.
March 31st, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Cheers mate, you answered my exact question - Vista x86 on D865PERL with RAID 1 enabled. Thanks!
April 22nd, 2007 at 4:23 am
i have 2 OS before, XP and Vista, then i formatted the drive where the XP was installed,Vista is still running, I want to reinstall Win XP to have 2 OS at the same time but my pc wont boot xp cd, why?
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:50 pm
I have a 4 year old Dell XPS with the Intel 82891EL SATA Raid controller. I too went to the Intel site (tried the Dell, they had no driver to offer #$%&* I won’t forget - Never again will I buy a Dell).
As Ben said -
Fortunately, the last ICH5R-compatible version of Intel’s RAID driver (Intel Matrix Storage Manager 5.5) does work with Vista. Or at least, it works for me. I grabbed the “Floppy Configuration Utility - Intel Matrix Storage Manager” download from Intel’s site, imaged a 3.5″ disk, inserted it during the Vista install, and it’s worked like a champ.
Thank God for Google. This search led me to the right driver:
Intel 82801ER SATA Raid driver + Vista
Thanks Ben and thank goodness the old XPS had a 3.5 floppy drive.
May 11th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
[…] permalink Yes I was able to perform a fresh/clean install of Vista onto an RAID0 array. My motherboard had the ICH5R chipset. This blog post gave me the information that I needed to install: Ben Galbraith’s Blog Blog Archive Intel 865PE Raid and Vista […]