X399-HD not showing in UEFI boot list in RAID mode

MisterJ,  thanks for cheering me up?¦LOL! I have to say.. been using RAID controllers since 1997, and have never had problems like this.

 I heard from AMD support..finally. They did not have anything substantive. They suspect a "config error", and asked for screen shots of UEFI.

 Sent them pics of UEFI and also of Windows initially recognizing the RAID1 array, and then their software blocking it with the idiotic "licensing" message. I'll let you know if they figure out the issue...but I bet it is AMDs UEFI or drivers causing it... because....

 In the process of reconfiguring my drives back into RAID1, so that I can send AMD pics, I realized that this rabbit hole is much deeper than I thought. I encountered so many new problems (all within UEFI, unrelated to windows), that I am convinced AMD never before wrote RAID control software ?? seems it was written by complete dilettantes:

1. Encountered ghost arrays, which you spoke about. Apparently, UEFI does not like when disks are removed from an array, before the array is explicitly deleted. Reconnecting  those drives back, even after being cleaned using DISKPART, still causes the array to reappear, but in a strange state,... plus the drives appear as individual arrays. At that point, the ghost array cannot be deleted. To delete the ghost array, the disks must be reattached to the ghost array, and then the array explicitly deleted.

 A different problem:

2. Disks which were part of a RAID1 array , after being removed from the array, disconnected from MB, cleaned using DISKPART and reconnected, cause an unrelated boot disk to go offline --  a disk which never had any relationship to the RAID array. The moment these disks are again disconnected from the MB, the boot disk immediately comes on-line (reboot is not required)!!  The only way I found to fix this is to initialize the drives (on a different computer) using MBR scheme (GPT sometimes works and sometimes fails). After that, reconnecting the drives back  to the MB does not cause problems with the boot disk. Amazing!

 This looks the AMD software  was done with no QA testing whatsoever!

 Cheers!

Parsec, thank you for the detailed response, and analysis.

Yes, after many hours learning about how UEFI works, I came to the same conclusion that win7 messes up the linkage from the boot loader to the windows loader.

 The article you pointed out is superb. Thank you. I found a much more rudimentary discussion about efi file locations (step 11 you highlight in the article), and tried adjusting the locations of all the files mentioned, but it did not help. I think the path, referring to the partition location was incorrect in my case. I was planning to fix it manually using BCDEdit, but then found a tool (Easy Recovery Essentials) which fixed it automatically. Spared me the tedious command-line editing using BCEdit.

 I gave up on AMD?™s RAID. It does not work, and looking through the threads here, it seems the problems are not confined to just Win7.  I am very  disappointed in AMD -- both their programmers and their support. It has been 9 days since I raised a ticket with AMD support, and not a peep out of them, except a message that my inquiry was sent to advanced support. That was 6 days ago.

I hope you have received your replacement board and that the problem is fixed.

I cannot comprehend that a board replacement was needed to correct a UEFI setting error. Unbelievable! I guess CMOS clear or reset to default did not clear the raid array definition?

 How is the NVMe support on this board? Many problems? I am planning to wade into those waters in a few months when Samsung 980 comes out.

 On my end, I have managed to get past the last hurdle I mentioned. Windows actually installed completely under RAID mode. The problem was that win7 messed up the win boot manager settings, and could not initiate the windows load manager.  Took forever to identify. I suspect this has to do with windows installation on a GPT disk, rather than a problem caused by RAID mode installation. In any case I am now ironing out the remainder of the bugs.

In Win I have 2 raid controllers installed properly, and 2 for which windows did not install drivers, but are listed in the device list. Apparently (  https://community.amd.com/thread/214160 )  these drivers have to be installed manually. But, I have to figure out which drivers to use, as they are not obvious.

 I also set up a RAID1 array (2x 4TB), configured through UEFI (successfully!!), but I can?™t access it in Windows because RaidXpert2 (in windows)  claims "array 2 not allowed by current license level" !! Weird. Probably will have to contact AMD tech support to get this sorted out.

Best, Dan.