SUCCESS!
Repurposing a PC for using as HDTV/media container. Goal was to use 2 3TB drives in a raid1 arrangement. These drives would house both the OS and media information. The OS would be on it's own, smaller 100-150gb partition, with the data on the remainder.
As luck would have it, this was alot easier said than done. First off, the board would not see the drives' full capacity. And second, windows 8 limitation of not being able to boot from a BIOS/GPT combo. I really didn't want to add another drive to this computer just for the purpose of housing the OS.
My p5k deluxe also had the 1005 bios with the outdated oprom. Initial problem was just having the bios see the 3tb drives as 3tb, not 745gb. Obtaining and flashing the bios in post 6 resolved one issue. However, how do I install and boot windows AND have access to the full capacity of the drive. Although not the setup I had intended, it was impossible to get windows to install on a single partition of 3TB/GPT without EFI. I even played around with DUET, which worked in ahci, but no raid mode.
To solve the windows problem, I created 2 arrays with the intel oprom. Physically, both arrays were using the same disks, but as far as windows was concerned, the OS array was a separate drive from the data array. This arrangement is acceptable as the larger GPT volume is not being used for booting.
I decided to setup the windows volume as raid0 for improved performance. Not overly concerned about fault tolerance. Once the system is setup, the drive will be imaged. There won't be much change to settings/programs. If one of the drives fails, I can always restore the OS. The data is what needs to be recoverable and safe (raid1)
Below are the instructions on how to do this.
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1) Update bios with newer oprom
http://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-As...3TB-drives
post # 6
2) In bios, set up ICH sata as RAID
3) Enter raid bios - ctrl - i
4) define 2 volumes
-----volume 1 : Windows : 150 GB: Raid 0 : data Stripe size 64KB
-----volume 2 : Data : remainder of drive : Raid1
5) Boot windows 8 x64 installation disk
6) Proceed to install windows
7) At drive selection screen, the 2 3TB drives will show as 746.5GB each
8) ****IMPORTANT***
From this link,
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/SearchR...%AE+RST%29
Click on IntelĀ® Rapid Storage Technology (IntelĀ® RST) RAID Driver
Which brings you to this link
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_...9&lang=eng
Select the appropriate f6flpy version based on the version of windows you're installing
Download and extract to usb flash drive
9) Back at the drive selection screen, click Load driver and point to the extracted files from # 8. After driver has been loaded, remove the usb flash drive.
10) Refresh the drive selection screen (click on R). The drive selection screen should now indicate the raid volumes defined in #4
11) Perform these steps, items in quotes needs to be typed
shift-f10 to open a dos prompt
"diskpart"
"list disk"
Make a note of which volume is what
In my case, disk 0 = 150gb volume, disk 1 = 2719gb volume
"select disk 0"
"clean"
"select disk 1"
"clean"
Clean command wipes any partition and volume formatting from the [virtual] disk.
Assuming disk 1 is the disk with the larger capacity, it needs to be converted to GPT type partitioning, otherwise, use the select disk command to change to appropriate #
"convert gpt"
You may have to substitute other numbers for after select disk based on your configuration
"list disk"
The larger capacity disk should now have * in it's row under the GPT column
"create partition primary"
This creates the data partition on the larger drive. Doing this from the setup GUI seems to reset the GPT flag on the drive back to MBR.
"format fs=ntfs quick"
Formats partition using ntfs file system
12) In the GUI drive selection screen, click on refresh. Drive 1 should indicate no unallocated space, and drive 0 should be empty
13) Click on drive 0, then click on next. Setup will begin copying files over. The machine will reboot several times. Unless the proper raid volume has been defined in the boot order, it is probably best to press F8 to manually choose the WINDOWS volume until setup is complete.
14) Once windows is installed, immediately after installing the chipset driver, install RST
setuprst.exe from
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_...9&lang=eng
15) You may neeed to assign a drive letter to the larger drive
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