Problems with Raid in Windows 7

While building my new computer, I ran into a problem after I added 2 disks from the old one that were configured as a Raid array, after installing Windows 7 on a non-Raid disk and installing the Raid drivers from the MSI utility and driver DVD.  My new motherboard is an MSI P55-GD65.

I found a pointer to the answer here (one of the postings contains a link to a Microsoft support article. In essence, Windows is unable to assign the Raid drivers to a Raid device if it has seen the individual disks before a volume was created in the Bios, and Windows can no longer start up. I did not get a blue screen, but after seeing the Windows boot message for a few seconds, it would start over with the memory test.

The registry tweak described in the support article worked for me. I did not have to uninstall the disks – I just set them “offline” in the disk manager and reinstalled the Raid driver. After the PC rebooted, I turned on Raid in the Bios, and Windows was able to start up and correctly identify the Raid volume.