How to NOT Upgrade your Computer to Windows 7

Realizing that I being able to develop on my desktop would come in handy while my laptop was otherwise in use, yesterday I decided to turn it on and bring it up to speed.  Seeing as I had no Visual Studio installed, I decided I might as well upgrade to Windows 7 before I bothered to install anything.  While booting to an install thumb drive, I recalled the horrible pain in the ass I had to go through to get my RAID working to install Vista some years ago.  The mobo on my computer is an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (socket 939) so I first went and looked into exactly what I was running and what I could find on the internet.  The mobo supports RAID through nForce4 (NVidia) and a Silicon Image controller.  So first thing I did was downloaded a plethora (yes El Guapo, I know what a plethora is) of drivers that seemed like they’d fit the bill.  After trying this for several hours last night, I hit failure.  Deciding it wasn’t meant to be, I put up a disappointing status on the good book and went to bed.

Not to disappoint me like my driver search had, I awoke to a few different suggestion, most of them from Atomic.  After further talking with him at work, I decided to try a couple different things:

1. Unplugging the SATA cables from the onboard SI ports and plugging them into the Nvidia ports.
2. Updating my BIOS.
3. Turning off the SI controller and turning on the Nvidia “MediaShield” controller.
4. Trying to find newer drivers again.

So after getting home from work today, the first thing I did was update the bios.  This went over well until I rebooted and my RAID controller couldn’t find any devices (not even hard drives!).  At this point I was pretty sure I had completely EFFED my entire system.  After plugging the cables into the Nvidia ports and trying again, I still had nothing.  At this point I just said screw it, as long as I can get the damn thing to install.  So I scoured my bios and found how to turn off the SI Controller.  However, there was no way to turn on Mediasheild.  After a bit of research, it would seem that while I have the Deluxe mobo, Atmoic has the Premium.  Mine is without Mediashield.  Still screwed, I spent another hour trying to load different drivers.  I went through Asus and Nvidia’s sites as well as numerous forums and found nothing.  Finally I came upon Silicon Image’s PCI to 4 Port SATA150 drivers.  Finally I had pay dirt.  The drivers successfully loaded during the Windows 7 install and showed my now recreated (and blank) RAID array.  So while I failed to keep any of my data (not as bad as it could be thanks to primarily using a laptop) I am now running Win7 on both home computers.