Hardware: ASRock H97M-ITX/ac motherboard Two 4TB hard drives One 120GB SSD
So here's what I'm trying to do. I want to run my two hard drives in RAID 1 through the motherboard's hardware RAID, purely for storage. And I want to dual boot Windows 7 and Debian off separate partitions on the SSD. And I've been having nothing but problems with this.
First of all, the hardware RAID requires that my motherboard's SATA controller be changed from AHCI mode to RAID mode. Once I did that, I was able to create the RAID 1 volume on the two hard drives through an "Intel Rapid Storage Technology" page in my motherboard BIOS, that's all fine.
The problem occurs when I then try to install Windows 7. I apparently needed a very specific RAID controller driver loaded from a flash drive during the W7 setup for my drives to even be visible. This specific driver seemed only to be available on the original driver disc that came with my motherboard, which by some miracle I still had. The motherboard BIOS had a utility specifically to copy this driver from the disc to the flash drive. I was able to load the driver and the drives became visible.
Now I've hit another problem. Widows gives me a big fat error when i try to select the drive to install on:
"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu."
Internet research hinted that it might have been the fault of the existing partitions on the drive. I was able to clean the drives completely through the DISKPART utility that I started through the command prompt in the recovery options, still no dice.
Another lead I found is the fact that I can't assign the drives to the boot priority list in the BIOS. They show up in the RAID menu, and I can boot from flash drives and my optical drive. But my hard drives don't show up as an option to boot from.
I'm kind of at my wit's end here. I can't find any sort of option in the BIOS indicating that the drives aren't bootable. They just aren't. If anyone has any idea what's going on, it would be much appreciated.
