Win Vista 64-bit

[drwalker]

Hi all. I am running 2 Samsung 7200 rpm 320 GB drives in Raid 0 on a Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 motherboard. There are two ways of setting up raid on this board. The first is using normal SATA ports and setting up the raid array via the ICH9 southbridge. The second way is via what Gigabyte calls GSATA and uses dedicated GSATA ports and an on-board controller. Whichever way I do it, I cannot get a 64-bit install done. Either Vista Ultimate 64-bit or Win 7 64-bit beta. The 64-bit OS installer simply doesnt recognise the raid array. I have downloaded from the Gigabyte site a 64-bit pre-install driver to load when the OS installer asks for it - but still no joy. Has anyone had any joy with this MB? The rest of the setup is standard - Intel 9550 quad core and 2 GB DDR3 1066 ram. Thanks for any ideas!

[Ian Routley]

No ... but I have installed Vista64 on an ICH10R - for which the driver set seems to be common (ICH8R 9R 10R)

Was using Vista64 Ultimate SP1 Disc - not sure if SP1 had any specific enhancements - but I didn't have to load any specific drivers.

Currently I run 2 Raid0 drives on GSata, and the 2 System drives (SL SSDs) on the ICH10R

I'm not sure I can help beyond that.

[BradHosking]

My suggestion would be the following

I think you would be wise to have 1 more Hard Drive just for the Operating system and then a RAID 0 for FSX and others.

Use the Hardware raid when you run the system. AHCI Sata enabled in Bios and I think it is CTRL-I to enter the interface

Here is how mine is setup which was with Vista 64bit and is now Windows 7 64 Bit.

1 500GB main drive Seagate NCQ II - Runs OS and any of my files.

2 x 75 GB Seagate Sata II drives in Hardware RAID 0 - Runs FSX Only! - 16kb file size clusters (this is important when you setup your RAID!!) and formatted in Windows with 16kb cluster size. It is important that you don't just select default size.

Install the OS on the main drive.

Install FSX on your RAID 0 which in my case works out to be 145GB in file space available.

You could always download of course the Windows 7 Beta... it's a heap faster than Vista 64... however if you do stick with Vista make sure you install SP1 for it otherwise it is a dog.

See my sig.. have a Gigabyte board too

[drwalker]

Thanks to you both for your quick replies. Brad, I am guessing there will be no drama installing Win 7 64 bit on a lone sata drive. With the other 2 drives set up via the GSATA hardware raid, does Win 7 64-bit have any trouble recognizing the array? Thanks again for the help

[BradHosking]

Had no issues as I setup the array in the bootup of the system - hardware array not software array in Windows.

You can only try..

I have also been adding some tweaks for Windows 7 in the Windows 7 thread... hope they help for anyone with issues.

[BullockBob]

I have the P35-DS4 which I think is the board that was just before your board in the Gig lineup. I have both the same raid chipsets on this board. Also did a recent Vista 64bit install.

I installed both drivers (for both chipsets) from an additional drive in the system. I did have a problem in that when asked to add drivers it didn't seem to install them on the first time round. I "played around" for a while and got both to install, but honestly can't remember what the trick was.

So sorry for chewing up bandwidth when I can't actually offer any help, except to say it can be done with a bit of persevering. I'm also not sure that the benefits of using this type of raid (not really true raid) are all that great anyhow. There is some performance overhead on the OS and the failure rate of drives these days isn't that high, but thats another story.  \