I've got a motherboard with SATA AHCI enabled, and I need to disable it to run Memtest86+ (because Window's built-in RAM diagnostic tool isn't worth a barrel of warm snot), and because the Memtest developers are too lazy to fix the bootloader problem. Fine, I know how to do that.
The problem is, I, in a moment of insanity driven by the fact that I work with hardware RAID cards all the time, felt the need to enable the onboard RAID. In retrospect, this was stupid: the onboard raid is a joke, but I'm stuck with it.
My question is, if I disable AHCI am I going to lose the RAID information? I haven't been able to find a definitive yes or no anywhere, and I'm not in the mood to find out the hard way.
EDIT: The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P
EDIT2: People need to stop telling me to boot off a live CD. My optical drives are both SATA, and with AHCI enabled, Memtest86 stalls permanently at the "Loading......................" stage. This is the whole problem.
The USB key thing is a good idea, but the Floppy thing? Does anyone still have a floppy drive? I have an old external, but I can't be bothered to buy disks.
EDIT3: So, usb key. Worked for about 4 hours trying to make a Vista-bootable USB key (never done it, or needed to do it before, but thought I'd better myself), which was a micro-epic that culminated in me, drunk and frustrated, with a usb key that had been formatted, diskpart'd, and bootsect'd about 20 times, to no avail. Threw it out the window.
Took a fresh key, made it linux bootable (had to download the tools, so it took 5 minutes), installed the linux version, and it booted like a charm. Goddamn it.
Memtest86+ didn't work as well as I'd hoped: I couldn't localize the bad module exactly, and I ended up having to do the "RAM-shuffle" after all, but it did throw errors much faster than the crappy Windows version.
I'm planning on de-RAIDing the system this weekend, so when I get my new image made, I'll disable AHCI and see if it kills the RAID, just for the sake of experiment.
