Single NVME ssd to 2x NVME raid 0

Matt, welcome to these User Forums.

I have never done this type of migration so please bear with my questions here.

Am I correct that this is all happening on the same computer system?  i.e. the backup of the single SSD and the restore to the RAID pair of SSD's is all on the same machine?

If so, then what is the SATA controller mode used on these drives, is this the same for both or are they different?  I suspect that there may be differences in this area.

From an Acronis perspective, the RAID pair should present as if it were a single drive, so restoring a backup from a single drive to this RAID set should be fine without the need to run the Acronis Universal Restore utility - this is really intended for restoring an OS backup image to a different computer hardware platform (not to the same hardware where all the drivers should already be present).

Yes Sir. Same computer. I just wanted to add an identical NVME ssd drive and stripe them Raid 0 for the speed boost. When it was the single drive it was AHCI PCIe ssd. The two of them together are PCIe Raid0 with controller RAID. The bootable media can read them as a single disk yes so that part is working. The restore process works. The only thing is I cannot get the windows 10 to boot off the Raid array. I can change it back to single and restore and it works fine.

I am going to try something slightly different. I will restore my windows 10 to the single nvme ssd. Then I will set windows to reboot in safe mode. But instead of letting it reboot all the way I will boot from the USB key then make a second image of the drive with windows set to boot safe mode. then I will Raid0 again and restore from the new image and see if that does anything. A coworker technician told me safe mode should knock it so it loads fresh drivers. Let's see if he's right

Matt, you can sometimes run the single nvme SSD in RAID mode and try to get that working first before going to a full RAID array of the two drives.

See webpage: Changing from AHCI to RAID Without Reinstalling Win 10 for one example of a user wanting to do this.

Also webpage: Convert AHCI mode to RAID mode without re-installing 

These came from a Google search for change from ahci to raid ssd

Very cool. The first method is sort of what I am doing with the safe mode now. So instead of changing to raid, booting in safe mode then backing up, I am simply streamlining that process where after my restore onto the Raid0 windows should boot to safe mode after the restore since I set it to reboot to safe mode, then did not let it reboot then did the backup image.

Some other Acronis topics on this subject.  

? Can I restore AHCI Image to a RAID-0 array?   

True Image 2013 Plus Pack Universal Restore Usage for AHCI Mode to RAID 0 Mode migration  

ACHI to RAID  

Blue Screen When Booting Restored Image: Solved (AHCI 0x0000007b error)

So Safe mode didn't work. Universal restore function doesn't work. Not sure what is left to try. This is frustrating.

so this time I am running command prompt as admin, putting in the command bcdedit /set {default} safeboot minimal to make it try safe mode every time then I will re-image that and try again.

hmmm interesting even when I turn on intel rapid storage but don't set raid 0 windows will fail to boot even off the single drive until I turn intel rapid storage off. Even with the OS set to boot into minimal safe mode.

Matt,

It sounds to me like your computer is still set in AHCI mode not RAID.

To set your computer to RAID you must do so by changing the SATA mode from AHCI to RAID, have you done that? (Requires change to be made in the bios)

Please tell us what motherboard you have, make and model.  Are your NVMe drives installed direct to the motherboard or on add in PCIe cards?

When you built the WinPE media did you choose to add drivers when asked? 

No it's definitely Raid0 when I do the restore. Raid0 two Corsair MP500 240GB nvme PCIe ssd drives become one 445GB volume. The rescue USB sees it as one, the restore seems to go without a hitch. It's just booting windows after I am not having success with. It goes to the troubleshoot screens after a couple failed boots. 

Asus Strix Z270e
32GB Gskill TridentZ RAM 3000mhz
2x Corsair MP500
1x WD Black 1TB
Intel i7-7700k
Asus Strix GTX 1080Ti video card
 

So I take it then you setup the RAID set as outlined in the user manual chapter 4?

You also set the PCH Storage Configuration to Intel RST Premium With Intel Optane System Acceleration (RAID)?

I note that you have said a couple of times that you mention using Universal Restore and drivers on a USB key.  You do not need to have drivers on a USB key nor do you need to use Universal Restore for this to work.

The WinPE media created using the MVP tool will automatically inject the RAID storage drivers necessary for your RAID set.  Once you restore your image to the set it should be bootable without any further action.

Do you have a CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive installed in your PC?  If you do then I suspect that this is causing your problem.  After you perform the restore operation to the RAID set shutdown the machine using the shutdown option on the WinPE interface.  Remove the WinPE media from the PC.  Start the PC and enter the bios, go to your advanced setup, boot tab and scroll down until you find the boot order list.  Use the dropdown arrow to reveal all options of the first position in the boot order list and select Windows boot manager.  Once you have Windows boot manager displayed in the first position select Save and Exit the bios and allow the PC to attempt boot.  It should work.

Windows boot is the top of the priority list. No spot on my In Win 303 case for an optical drive so I don't have one. I might try doing this with the 1TB WD black HDD disconnected from the SATA port on the motherboard?

Matt,

I see in a previous post you state that prior to your attempt to move to a RAID set your drive was set as an AHCI device.  Looking at Device Manager on your single disk working install what do you see in Storage Controllers for for drivers?  If you do not see the Intel Chipset SATA RAID Controller listed under Storage Controllers then you have found your problem.

You need to have the Intel RAID driver installed in your working system prior to backup and restore to your RAID set.  In your machine bios when you activate the Intel RAID you should see a driver number such as 15.X.X.XXXX.  This is the PCH driver in your machine bios.  The first two digits are the driver series number.  For best performance it is wise to stick with the same series drivers so have a look in your bios for this information.

Armed with that information go to the Intel Support site here

The first driver listed is the latest Storage Driver available (15.7.0.1014)  you might also wish to grab the latest Memory driver which is shown second in the list Intel Optane Memory with the same driver number.  Download these drivers and install them to your working disk.  After that create a new backup image then setup your RAID set again and restore to it.  Check for Windows Boot Manager as being first in the Boot Order list then save exit the bios a reboot the machine.

Cool yes I believe I did see the AHCI driver. But now how do I install the IRST driver while it's not in RAID mode? I did download and do the install before the original backup image was created. However, if it's not in RAID at the time, how do I make it use that driver??

You can set the PCH SATA mode to RAID, reboot and Windows should start unless you are running Windows 7 or earlier.  Once Windows starts then install the drivers.  You might have to do that the manual way telling Windows that you will specify where the drivers are.

Once drivers are installed make a backup of the system and use it to restore to your RAID set.

So I went to the intel page. It's telling me the Intel Rapid Storage Technology is already installed on my system. Before I reboot should I perhaps remove from the device manager the current ahci driver .. uninstall it then reboot with RAID mode on.

Under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers there is Standard SATA AHCI controller. But I think that's for my 1TB WD Rlack drive I have on a SATA port.

Your looking in the wrong place see the screenshot below:

Did you use the link I provided to the Intel download site?  Did you download the .exe or the.zip file?  Once you look as directed above look for the Intel Optane or RAID controller.  Right click on that entry of it is present and select Properties then click on the Driver tab and make note of what driver is installed.  If it says Microsoft driver then the Intel driver is not installed.  In that case download the .zip file, unpack it to an easy to remember location then use Device Manager to update the driver manually and point to the location where you saved the unpacked files.

In my bios it says Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver version 15.5.0.2875

In my windows device manager it says Standard NVM Express Controller 10.0.15063.0

So if I try to manually get the zip I could manually point the update driver to the new files. My Asus utility program keeps trying and failing to update to the newer version so maybe that's my issue.

Sorry forgot to attach

OK Interesting. On the intel download page there is another file not .exe or zip versions of Setup RST (the zip just has the exe inside it so they are essentially the same download) there is another one called "f6flpy-x64" zip file which contains the Files I recognize as being for iaSorA.sys etc. I will try to update manually to the new version and see if it then matches with the version number in the bios. If It does I will attempt again.

Unpacked files. Pointed update driver dialog to the folder I extracted to. Then it did not install and told me the best version of the driver is already installed.

I think it says microsoft driver is installed. When I try to point it to the intel files I extracted it still keeps these ones.

Your screenshot proves that the Intel RAID controller is not installed.  The Standard NVMe controller entries (both of them) are there for your 2 NVMe drives and yes, the drivers are those of Microsoft..

The Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver version 15.5.0.2875 is the Intel driver for the PCH RAID controller embedded on your motherboard.  It is a series 15 driver.  The drivers on the Intel site that I pointed you to are series 15 drivers as well so you are good there.

It is fine that you use the f6flpy-x64 file for your drivers.  I think the reason that Windows refuses to update the files is that you do not have RAID enabled on your motherboard bios yet.  Did you enable the PCH SATA mode to RAID and then boot onto Windows as I ask that you do previously?  Your Device Manager screenshot tells me that you have not.  You must do that first so that the Intel controller shows up in Device Manager because that controller is the driver you are trying to install for.  As it is the only controller Windows knows about is a Generic one for which it has installed what it deems the most recent driver for your NVMe drives.  That is why it is preventing you from updating the driver.

I will have to check when I get home but I think I have a catch-22 on that one. To get at any of the raid functionality in my Asus bios I have to have Intel Rapid Storage flipped to "on" or else I cannot see anything for RAID. I will have another double check when I get home to be sure tonight.

Looking online I think I can turn on the raid controller for SATA without turning on the Intel Rapid Storage Technology thorugh the advanced tab of advanced mode. Will check when I get home from work. Excited if this is all it takes.

Sorry website double posted after server error message. Please delete this comment.

Ok Matt,

Please open or download the BIOS Manual found Here

Look on page 43 at Section 1.6.5 PCH Storage Configuration then SATA Controller(s).  This item must be set to Enabled.  Please look at the note below this instruction in the manual. which says "The following item appears only when you set the SATA Controller(s) to [Enabled]. This refers to the first entry on page 44.

Now look at page 44 at SATA Mode Selection.  You need to select the second option [Intel RST Premium with Intel Optane System Acceleration (RAID)].  This will enable the Intel storage controller on your board.  With that enabled boot Windows and install the RAID drivers as I advised previously manually browsing to the location of those files.

Once you have installed the drivers a reboot is necessary for the install to take effect.  Make sure you do that step prior to creating a new backup image.

Now create a new backup image, once you have that boot into your bios once again and setup your RAID set.  If all settings are correct which I believe they now should be and you have chosen which drives to create the raid set with, the Intel controller should format the drives into a RAID 0 configuration.  Once that is complete you can now save and exit the bios and boot into the WinPE Recovery media that you created and restore the new image to the new RAID set.  Done!  Shutdown the WinPE media and remove.  Boot machine to bios and insure that Windows Boot Manager is listed first in the boot order list, once confirmed reboot. 

Yes I think I have it now. So for some reason it seemed to be forcing me to turn on RST from the front page of the bios to get at the raid settings. But under the advanced mode enabled, advanced tab and PCH I found I could enable it just on SATA and disable it on the two M.2 drives then save. Windows booted and the intel controller driver now appeared in device manager under storage controllers along side the Microsoft ones. Now that the controller is showing up in device manager, I rebooted and enabled the raid on both PCIe drives manually, then went back to the front page and turned on RST and rebooted again. Reboot successful. So now the Microsoft drivers have gone away and just the Intel controller remains in the list with the Microsoft ones gone. So now I am going to make a new image with the bootable usb, raid0 my two m.2 drives again and then restore and if I am correct, it should work. I do have some customer orders to finish before I make the attempt but I think I am feeling more positive about this now. Thank you guys for all your help this level of service is superb.

COOL. OK made the big attempt and IT WORKED. Thank you again for all your help. I am just going to quickly extend the partition to fill the rest of the new Raid0 volume since now there's more space. Very thankful for all the help

There you go! Your Welcome.

Thank you for the instructions however these only worked partly in my instance as I was using Acronis 2016. I have followed the above work instructions and got as far as creating the original image post installation of the RST driver in windows 10 however after creating the raid volume in bios that volume was not detected in acronis when booking of the recovery usb WinPE media as it lacked the Intel RST driver. To fix this I upgraded 2016 to 2018 and followed the below article here:

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/blog/posts/power-user-insights-advanced-w…

2018 allows for manual driver addition to the WinPE instance which allowed for the Intel RST driver to be added at which point the Raid volume was detected. 

For referance I upgraded from a 500GB Samsung Evo m.2 nvme to 2 x Raid 0 with a Asrock 370 Extreme4 MB

Please also note that after the sucessful recovery Windows 10 did not allow for the system partition to be expanded in disk manager to take advantage fo the extra disk space, most google articles point to the use of https://www.easeus.com partition utility to to expand the volume however this failed for me with an error, the software also requires registration and payment to proceed, stay away for this product

I was able to expand the volume with no problems using AOMEI Partition Assistant this which was also free: https://www.aomeitech.com/partition-resource/extend-volume-greyed-out-1…

Hops this helps someone else out.