Asrock x399 Taichi M.2 NVMe SSD RAID?

Thanks much, free-eagle!  I suspect my problem is the SSD with data on it that I want to keep.  I suspect that leaving one NVMe outside the RAID is bad, but it is what I want to do and the system MUST support it!  As I said above, I am in contact with AMD support on this and your post will help a lot.  Thanks and enjoy, John.

Truly bizarre afternoon with RAID.  I built a RAID0 with two of my three EVO 960s.  One has data on it I want to keep.  Delete Array only shows the size, not even the Physical ID (like 1:1:0).  So, I had to use the Physical path to connect the order of the drive appearance with the serial number.  I knew the serial to the SSD I wanted to keep.  I took a chance that between two BIOS screens the order did not change and Deleted the Array (really just a disk) for both drives.  I inject my drivers into the boot images, so I would not need the USB with drivers.  However when I got to the 'Install Where' screen, there were two 232 GB disks (my SSDs) and no RAID0.  I used Load Driver and browsed to the file containing the drivers on my other SSD (parsec's idea).  They seemed to install just fine.  I selected the RAID0 and started installation of W10 (1709).  When it came time to reboot, the system hung.  In fact my system never Restarted without a Reset button push.  During my unattended install, I run a large batch file and the system crashed in the middle (TIMER_OR_DPC_INVALID).  I tried again using W10 (1703), but it still would not Restart.  I deleted the RAID0 and installed W10 (1709) on one of my SSDs.  At lease for me RAID is usable.  I am in contact with AMD about RAID and will report this to them.  Enjoy, John.

EDIT:  I have determined what the problem is with the injected drivers.  Now I need to find a solution.

EDIT: My solution is to rebuild my WinPE USB and inject the drivers into boot.wim.


Edited by MisterJ - 31 Oct 2017 at 1:54am

Thanks for your reply MisterJ

There is a misunderstanding here. I hope I can clear it up as I describe my process over the last week.
The situation is as follows:
I installed the optane drives. UEFI does not recognise any of them. Array Management screen is completely greyed out. I cannot delete any arrays because no old arrays exist on these ssds, therefore delete arrays is greyed out.

Boot win10 usb install. The installer recognises the optane drives. I install windows on one of them. Installation works and has to reboot to finish. Cannot boot since no bootable device was found. I then took this optane drive out and put it into a B350 gigabyte motherboard. Drive gets recognised and I can boot that win10 install. It finishes up installation fine and I now have a ryzen pc with one optane module as boot drive. Put the drive back in my x399 system and it is not recognised again and no boot is possible.

The ssd working on B350 Ryzen and not on x399 tells me the problem is with TR4 platform.
Next I will need to find someone with a different x399 mainboard to confirm it is a platform problem and not something specifically related to my Asrock board.

Franz

Hello
I am sorry it took me so long to reply.
As of now it looks like there is some kind of problem with my motherboard. I dont know if it is the x399 Asrock lineup or if it will not work with any x399 board.
I contacted Asrock support and their testing aligns with my problem. Supposedly they are in contact with AMD to figure out a solution.

In the meantime I tried my ssd on some gigabyte AM4 mainboard and while I cannot test nvme raid because there is only one m.2 slot, at least it is recognised in UEFI and I can boot from there. This tells me it is something related especially to TR4.

Franz

free-eagle wrote: my problem is solved. to use a nvme raid configuration i had to clean all old arrays and disks, build all new arrays in bios raidxpert and reinstall the system from scratch. after this all is working as expected. there is a small partition on every disk from the raid controller and because i used a raid before the upgrade to bios 1.7 it is needed to initialize all the disks at first. only breaking up the array dont work for me.

Unfortunately, AMD said in order to use the new NVMe RAID, all RAID arrays and disks must be recreated when using the new AMD NVMe compatible RAID drivers and supporting UEFI/BIOS update.

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/NVMe-RAID-Support-for-the-AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-platform.aspx

Also as you said, the disks used with the earlier AMD RAID must be initialized to remove the old RAID metadata. Just breaking the RAID array when moving to the NVMe RAID support will not work for anyone.