Ha, OK. Just making sure, sorry 
Couple more options for you:
Option 1)
Check you don’t have “fast boot” or “quick boot” turned on as this will stop the screen displaying the boot ROM
Also turn off the “full screen logo” if that option exists.
Now when you boot you should see that screen, and you will need to press control+I to access the boot ROM.
Option 2) don’t bother using the BIOS. If these drives are just data drives and will not boot the operating system, then you can set up the mirror in windows using storage space.
Article here:
Guide here:
For what you are trying to do storage spaces would be much simpler and save you buying a raid card.
Good luck
Hi, do you mean the Windows fast startup, or something in the BIOS? I can’t see that setting in the BIOS, but maybe I need to look a bit more. The fast startup is already off.
No idea. I haven’t seen this one.
But as I mentioned above, the idea is to make this a dual-booting rig (work in progress, alas), so surely just setting it up in Windows will not go through to my (currently out of use but hopefully soon to be visible) Linux installations?
It will be a setting in the bios. On my Asus z77 board it is called fast boot I think.
Note of you are using a HDMI cable it may be that you just can’t see the screen as your graphics card is hiding it until windows boots up. If you have access to a display port or DVI connector, or even better a VGA, you should try that.
Sorry I missed that bit in your post. So you want to format these as ntfs drives and use them in both windows and Linux. If that is the case I’d go with @Adubs recommendation and get a dedicated raid card. Linux can be a bit funny with fakeraid and even more funny with ntfs formatted disks on fakeraid.
Unless it is a game drive I’d actually suggest moving the spinning rust out of your rig altogether into a NAS and just access from both operating systems via a share. That way you can tinker with the system as much as you like with the dual boot and not lose any data.
This is a bit weird. I can’t see that setting anywhere in the BIOS. But I will look again, and again, and will have another look at the manual 
The motherboard is from 2012. Is it possible that it just doesn’t have that particular setting? I’ve had people asking me about this a few times now.
Good question, but that’s not the reason that I’m not seeing the RAID config screen. I’m using my old monitor for all this BIOS-techy stuff. Only just recently shifted to using HDMI on the telly - many years behind you guys, of course 
Aaaah, I can’t really afford to buy too much more stuff yet (although it’s true that I was looking at NAS for a little bit, just to understand it all and catch up with you guys). Maybe I need to clarify one possible point of misunderstanding by asking this question. Is it not possible to have one drive on the system which is not on the RAID (ie the SSD holding the OSes) and two other drives (the data HDDs) which are on the system? Or does it just not work like that??? Of course the idea would be, like you said, to tinker with the OS drive independently of the data drives. Not possible within the same rig? Could I not connect the data drives to a RAID card, and leave the SSD connected to the motherboard? (cheaper than buying an NAS thingy!)
Sorry, I’m here to learn more than anything else 
Had a quick look at the manual. the full screen logo setting is in the BIOS settings menu. Page 44 of the manual covers this. Turn this off and you should be able to see the relevant menu for RAID control.
Yes this is fine. the RAID software (Intel rST) will let you run a hybrid of raid and non-raid drives. Any drive you dont set to be RAID will remain non-RAID.
Yes that option would also work. Just be careful of how the RAID card drivers install. Adaptec and LSI cards should be fine but more obscure ones may have “accelerator” features that use main memory and only work on one OS or another.
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Oh wow, thanks very much for looking at the manual. Beyond the call of duty! I feel guilty now for being lazy 
Actually I can’t believe that I’ve never noticed that setting, considering how many hundreds of times I must have been on that particular screen!!!
Anyway, I’ll try that a bit later. Resting up now, because I twisted my ankle earlier (and I don’t even really know how I did it!!!)
Just tried changing that setting, but not much happening there. I get a screen saying “American Megatrends” (whatever that’s about) and then it’s just dark matter 
No options whatsoever.
I had also already changed the SATA setting to RAID. Not sure if that’s skipping a stage or something. I’ll have another look this evening.
HI again. Just to say that I’m not really getting anywhere with this. When I just turn off full screen logo on its own, I go straight to the OS login, normally enough. And then when I switch from IDE to RAID I get that “American Megatrends” logo, like I said before, and nothing else. Pressing CTRL-I while that’s going on doesn’t do anything. Nothing close to the screen that the manual says I’m supposed to see. Is it possible that the “secure boot” thing is getting in the way?
It’s quite frustrating, because at the same time I’ve got another thread going on this forum about problems that I’m having with setting up stable dual-booting (and that of course is the reason why I want to set up RAID in the BIOS and not only in Windows). The guys on that thread also talked to me about “secure boot”, which I was getting mixed up with Windows fast startup. Once I understood that it’s something different (and couldn’t find it in the BIOS setup), I started looking at BIOS updates, and it turns out that there is one here and here. I don’t understand why there are two such similar-looking updates, but both of them mention secure boot, so I assume it must be relevant to what’s going on. I’ve just downloaded 1.1, and have extracted it, but I’ve never tried a BIOS update before, so I’m quite nervous about it.
There’s a load of info on this pretty old thread on a Gigabyte forum. Is that good (or even 100% correct) procedure? Sorry, I feel a bit pathetic asking for reassurance in this way, but of course I’m nervous about losing the motherboard completely!
Is this bios revision older than your current bios? If so do not apply it. It is high risk to go backwards in bios updates unless you know what you are doing as it may cause issues.
As to above, secureboot and fastboot are basically the same. Essentially this is a setting that enables windows to use an area of the motherboard flash to bypass certain checks if nothing has changed hardware wise. You need to disable this to access boot-time settings on the motherboard.
Given the frustration you are having I think your best course of action is to spend $10 on a raid card and do this on dedicated hardware. Hopefully that is affordable for you. It will also make the array portable to a new motherboard if and when you are ready to upgrade.
Hi again. The answer is that I just don’t know! Is there some way to find out what BIOS version I’ve got? I inherited this rig from a friend in 2016, and have no idea whether or not he would have done any BIOS updates.
The update that I found is from 2012 (which is when the motherboard came out, I believe), and I can’t see anything more recent on the Gigabyte site. I did see something elsewhere from 2016, but it’s not on the Gigabyte site so I don’t know whether it’s safe to trust:
https://drivers.softpedia.com/downloadTag/Gigabyte%20GA-Z77P-D3%20BIOS%20update
I’ve got to say that it’s all quite confusing.
Of course I don’t mind spending a small amount on a RAID card, because time is money, and this is all proving extremely time-consuming. And sure of course I agree with what you say about future use. However, I do want to make sure, as you mentioned earlier, that it’s a card that will be safe to use with Linux as well as Windows. Would the one that Adubs recommended be OK? Seeing that it’s not one of the mainstream names that you mentioned before.
Yes that is a standard LSI controller. It will work fine in linux.
Latest BIOS is F8e
do not download that one from “softpedia”. Only download the one from Gigabyte’s site.
When you first boot the machine it will tell you what BIOS revision it is, also in the home page of the BIOS. It will be the letter F followed by a number.
There is a lot to learn but thats the fun part. If you need the system for work or school, i’d suggest not doing too much in the BIOS and just keep it running. If this is a second machine you can take more risks. Generally BIOS flashing is fairly safe if you follow the procedure to the letter but be careful of “guides” from hacker sites as they tend to assume you know how to get yourself out of trouble or can junk the system if it breaks.
Right, so I’ve just gone ahead and ordered that one. I suppose it might take a while to arrive if it’s coming from China (you never really know, eh), so I’m setting the RAID up in Windows for now. I do realise I’ve got to start again from scratch when the card comes, and that I’m putting the drives through a lot of spinning by filling them up with data just now, but I can’t leave everything only on the external drive for too long. Having just lost a bit (fortunately not a very important load) of data from a hard drive failure, I can’t take chances any more, and that’s why I want to set up a very basic RAID (more complicated ones in the future maybe!)
Ha, I know, and I try to keep smiling and positive, but like anyone else I get frustrated sometimes. I suppose that this old motherboard is the main source of many of the problems that I’m having. That’s certainly the main thing that I’m learning, and I’ll have a very good idea of how to go about things when I finally get around to building my own power PC.
It looks like I’ll still need to do this BIOS upgrade to deal with the Windows/Linux dual-booting problems anyway, but since this is still my primary machine, and not a secondary hobby-horse, I can’t take too many risks, and so I’ll cross that bridge when I’m good and ready.
Thanks for all the help, of course. I hope that the card will be easy enough to set up. If not, I’LL BE BACK 
But not for a little while at least 
Hi, I’ve just come back to the this job. I broke my wrist coming off my bike, and it’s the wrist of my good hand, so fiddly jobs involving a screwdriver have been out of the question for a while.
As I said in the last post, I ordered this M1015 card. And as usual, I am confused! I just can’t see where it is supposed to fit on this motherboard. Here are all the slots:
All the slots are available except for the big one at the top, which is used for the graphics. Sorry if the question is stupid, but the card really doesn’t appear to obviously fit anywhere (and I’m not confident about experimenting too much). The motherboard is fairly old, but surely not that old?!?!?!?
Hello, I finally got around to using this card last week, actually on a new motherboard (the old one got fried by that BIOS update, mentioned above)
I’ve got two things going on here, which probably amount to one thing actually.
The RAID is configured correctly (I assume) on the card as a RAID 1. After installing Windows, it was visible, but there have been a couple of occasions when it disappeared completely from the system. That stressed me out, of course, at the time, but then I realised that it was still there, and fine after rebooting. However, it is a bit of a concern. Also, I’ve just today got around to installing Ubuntu on this system, and none of the partitions on the RAID are visible. They’re also not visible from GParted booted from a USB. What to do about that, and is there any way to deal with the worry about Windows, or is it just a matter of the card being a relatively cheap one and therefore not 100% reliable?
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