Just upgraded from XP to W8 then W8.1 and cannot get the RAID to work.
For the upgrade, I took out the RAID drives, and just left the system drive in place.
In XP the system has run with a system disc connected to a SATA port, and two larger drives in RAID1 (Mirror). The 3 discs are IDE drives each with an IDE to SATA converter. Its an MSI H67MA-E35(B3) motherboard with low power (eco) i3 processor.
After the upgrade, the BIOS SATA was set to IDE. When I put the two larger drives back into the PC (these are in caddies), W8.1 recognises them as separate drives.
I changed the BIOS to RAID, then got "Windows ran into a problem and needs to restart ..", then into a fix loop. After investigating, I found that changing the registry key for a SATA AHCI boot is where to start: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\storAHCI\StartOverride to 0, then in msconfig setting boot to safe mode, restart the PC, in BIOS set SATA to AHCI it took ages to boot to safe mode. Resetting to normal boot it works fine in AHCI mode.
The result is the same as IDE mode, W8.1 boots and works the same.
With limited and often unclear information from the web, I wanted to move onto RAID config. So changed the key: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaSTorV\StartOverride to 0, this I understand is the Intel RAID driver activation, and setting to boot to safe mode, I then set the BIOS to RAID on reboot. W8.1 never even gets to safe mode, no matter what I then do I cannot get W8.1 to get past the "Windows ran into a problem and needs to restart ..".
I would really appreciate this answering once and for all, with a process that actually works, by someone who knows and is not just guessing - preferably someone from Microsoft PLEASE.
What seems so silly is that W8 is reading data from the main drive to give me the repair loop, so why has MS made this so stupidly difficult. It is not uncommon to want to add additional drives to a PC, and in the past this has not been an issue to achieve. This seems a real step backward from XP
Thanks.