Need assistance? I'm here to help.
Need assistance? I'm here to help.
I recently purchased a Samsung EVO 970 Plus M.2 PCIe NVMe drive with 500 GB storage at a discounted price of 77 USD. I cloned my 1 TB Toshiba HDD using Samsung software and restored it after erasing the original drive with DBAN. After initializing the new HDD, I ran DiskPart to check its status and found both drives configured in RAID. Since I primarily use the system for development and gaming, I didn’t expect RAID functionality. I changed the SATA operation mode from RAID on to AHCI, which caused the laptop to enter a bootloop. I then switched back to RAID on, but the issue persisted. I have a Dell support pen drive available if I need to reinstall Windows. Could you assist? Should I keep RAID on for SATA or switch to AHCI? Is it acceptable to use RAID with this setup, especially with a HDD and an SSD? System details: Alienware 15R3-2016, 8 GB DDR4 RAM, Intel Core i5-6300 HQ, Nvidia GTX 1060, 1 TB HDD, 500 GB PCIe NVMe M.2 Samsung 970 Evo Plus (new). I plan to use the SSD as the boot drive and the HDD for storage.
If you're stuck in the boot loop, I'd install Windows on your old storage and then restart from that drive to see if data can be recovered. Then I'd wipe the new drive using DBAN and begin fresh, keeping it separate from any RAID setup. If your old drive uses RAID, you might change its configuration before installing Windows to avoid issues. I'm not very familiar with RAID systems.
I discovered a workaround and saved it for others who might need it. It involves changing from RAID to AHCI to avoid bootloop problems. Using AHCI also allowed me to install Samsung Magician correctly by setting up the SSD drivers. Before RAID 0 was enabled, the system relied on IRST, which didn’t work with Samsung’s software.