Since I have my new PC with a Vista/Server 2008 dual boot I’m having issues with the RAID/SATA controller. Windows Server 2008 gave me popups about I/O errors since the beginning and Vista was doing quite fine till recently. Now I’m also getting the popups in Vista, I had some weird system freezes and my I/O speeds decreased dramatically. Of course I upgraded the RAID drivers (of the Intel ICH9R chipset) but it didn’t help.
Now that the Windows 7 beta 1 is out I though it’s time to reinstall the operating system on my PC. I already reinstalled my media center to Win7 and upgraded my laptop from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate. Both installations were very smoothly so expected no other for my desktop.
To make sure the I/O issues are not related to the ICH9R controller I bought a new RAID controller: the Promise Fasttrak TX4310. Now that I’m writing this post I still have my chassis open with cables everywhere. Windows 7 didn’t recognize the TX4310, so I downloaded the Vista driver, and copied it to an USB memory stick. Now the RAID-1 array and 1 TB disk were successfully detected. However I have 1 issue with formatting the disk. Clicking the RAID disk and pressing Format gave me an exception. Something about that the disk was read only. Here the Win7 setup was confused, because it tried to format the 200MB system partition instead. This partition was added automatically (found it necessary or something). I pressed Refresh (reordering the disks and partitions in the UI), selected the RAID disk again and choose Format again. Now it worked. A bug.
Windows 7 installed quite fast. I stop writing now because the installation just finished and I’m seeing the blue/red Win7 fish.
By the way: Super cool that the installation detected the Media center during setup and asked me to join the homegroup.