Really wierd stuff just went down.

So, im a long time PC user, with what i believe to be more than average knowledge.
Even so, i have failed to manage to figure out what the heck is going on with my computer at the moment.

So my pc has 3 7200rpm discs in RAID and a SSD disc.
I wanted to stop using raid. so i went into the screen before bios settings and deleted the RAID setting, then i went into bios to change sata settings from RAID to ahci or what it's named, the one that's not the IDE setting.

Then when i saved and restarted my computer, i first got to some kinda bluescreen type saying, there was nothing to boot from when i was going to boot from my windows 8 dvd, so i naturaly went into bios to change the boot settings, altough now bios was different from what it usually is, and it had different text in areas, and it randomly froze, and all text was missing from the exit menu(where u can save and reset etc) and after 3 reboots it suddenly stopped showing any screen image + the light in my mouse and keyboard doesent turn on anymore.

I tryed taking out my nvidia 760 and tryed using the integrated display device from intel, but still the same thing.
I even tryed to take out the motherboard cell battery for half a min then restarting.

Any ideas?? :/

get back into BIOS, reset RAID and hope it works again.

I've never used RAID, but I understand it can be very dependent on the drivers (if software based) or hardware card (if hardware based) for it to work. I don't think it's as simple as taking out the raid 1 HDD and turning off RAID, though I may be wrong.

And how did you use 3 drives in RAID? (I'm assuming not RAID3-5 on a domestic rig) If RAID 0 then you striped across 3 drives and your data is split (striped) between all 3 drives, they cannot run independently.

If RAID 1 mirror, then usually this is done in just 2 paired drives, each being a copy of the other, but you should be able to run 3 drives in RAID1 sfaik. But the drives will be configured to work in an array. I don't think even in RAID1 you can simply do away with the RAID driver and get the drive to work as if it was a standalone drive. Just that the RAID array knows if one drive breaks it can get all the data off the remaining drives.

After that is RAID 0+1 and RAID 1+0 or RAID 10 which use min 4 drives. Ditto RAID 6 but again, that brings a performance hit in writes and is not usually something a home user would run sfaik.

If you used RAID 1E then you need all 3 disks together in RAID as while it offers data redundancy it is scattered across all 3 drives, not existing entirely on any one drive.

wikipedia explains the different RAID types, but that doesn't answer why you can't take one drive out of RAID1 and just change the BIOS. It is probably something to do with how the drive is formatted and data stored e.g. No MBR would be a big issue if that depends on the hardware controller card for the OS to recognise it etc...

You can't just move from RAID to non raid by setting the bios - the data is spread across all three disks. If you want to go from raid to single drives, you have to reinstall windows.

Setting it back to RAID in the bios may get your system booting, but I doubt it.

Butuz

I don't think he's trying to load data from the HDD, that's not the issue. It looks like:

1) He's deliberately trashing/ignoring the data on the disks by just disabling RAID from BIOS.
2) He restarts with the Win8 DVD in hoping to use that to reformat the hdds and install OS again.
3) But his computer misses the boot from DVD option, so he tries to go into BIOS to change the boot order to force boot from DVD.
4) At this point the BIOS starts messing up.
5) Repeated boots display hardware failure symptoms with no display at all.

So it maybe nothing to do with RAID - that was just the background to how he started wanted to go into BIOS.

OP, my first suggestion would be to check your cabling - could be power cables or sata cables etc. are partially connection and causing issues. Failing that it's time to strip out the components and gradually rebuild them - it may help with connections, or help isolate which the failed component is in the case of that.

Completely try resetting your BIOS, by that I mean literally take out the small battery on your motherboard and wait a minute then put it back and restart, see if that works. If it's not booted to your DVD by default then change boot order and try once more, only then would I assume it's the disk or the hardware.

You can't change from RAID to AHCI and reboot into Windows without modifying the registry. Trying to boot in AHCI mode into Windows with a RAID array and not changing the registry settings will more than likely corrupt an array.

I take it the blue screen error was something along the lines of STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE?

Try to set your BIOS back to RAID mode for all disks and try to boot Windows. If it fails then the array is probably corrupt.

Assuming Windows was installed on the SSD, and not the RAID array, then you can try and disable the RAID array, i.e. disconnect the cables for the 3 HDs or disable the ports in BIOS, but keep the SSD connected and live. Make sure you set the BIOS settings to RAID as it was before. Try to boot into Windows.

If you are successful, then modify the Windows registry for SATA as follows...

1. Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
2. If you receive the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue.
3. Locate and then click one of the following registry subkeys:
4. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
5. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV
6. In the pane on the right side, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
7. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
8. Reboot and set BIOS to SATA mode for all drives.

Alternatively, [I don't have link privileges yet :wallbash:] google Microsoft Fix it 50470 and download the Fix this problem file from the Microsoft website to do the registry settings for you and then follow step 8 above.

Remove and leave out CMOS battery. Unplug everything from the motherboard, apart from CPU, one stick of memory, keyboard & mouse and graphics.

If it still freezes remove GPU and try internal intel graphics. Is your Intel graphics, chipset or CPU (i3,i5,i7) based?

Could do with some hardware info about your system.