Hey guys, hopefully you can help me out here! Bear with me as this will be long. Anyways, I have a 60gb OCZ SSD that I replaced with an 840 Evo about a year ago. After reading about using an SSD as a caching drive I decided I wanted to throw the OCZ back into my system and use it to cache my 1TB HDD. First off getting my system to see the OCZ drive was a pain and while trying to setup stuff it would constantly drop off and not be seen by windows or BIOS. Anyways after switching the system to RAID from AHCI with registry edits and moving the drives to different SATA ports (some of them were on a Asmedia controller I think) I finally got Intel RST to see all three drives in my system and allow me to accelerate my HDD. After telling it to use the OCZ drive to accelerate my HDD it said I needed to reboot. When rebooting for some reason it ran check disk and then rebooted again and the drive was gone. So I decided to reboot again and try to get the drive to show up again and somewhere in there I believe it totally wiped my HDD partition and shot my windows install in the head since my user profile became inaccessible. Tried to recover through safe mode but after a few recover attempts in there safe mode became inaccessible. Anyways when I went to try to reinstall the OS I could not get it to install until I switched back to AHCI mode. But since I'm going through the effort I wanted to do it proper for RAID mode. So I got a RST driver and attempted to reinstall the OS like that. With the driver it allowed me to attempt to install the OS in RAID mode but failed. After which I decided to unplug the OCZ and when I tried to reinstall windows on my 840 in RAID mode it went without a hitch. I didn't have to use the RST driver either (Or maybe windows setup still saw it?) But now I'm leery of attempting to plug that OCZ back into the system since it seemed like messing with it destroyed the system.
Sorry for the long post but I wanted to be descriptive as possible so you guys can give me your best thoughts with minimal further questions. Also any tips on recovering my 1TB HDD will be helpful as I have yet to write anything on it or even setup a new partition.
System specs:
i7 4770k @4.1ghz
Boot drive: 840 Evo 250gb
Storage: WD 1TB HDD
Other SSD: OCZ Agility 2 60gb
mobo: Asus Maximus VII Gene
MSI GTX 970
8gb Corsair Vengeance
Win 7 Home Premium
Sorry again for the long post. Thanks for any of your time and help!