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.
FINAL UPDATE
Turns out there was bad RAM AND bad slots. Not sure what the hell happened there, but it explains why I was never able to localize the problem. Installed new RAM and new Mobo, and hasn't had a problem since.