Hello,

I have this 5000X chipset board.

First, I fought with this board for a week trying to figure out how to get RAID arrays setup. The board shipped with BIOS 1.04 and I've been through 3 other versions. I figured out that the Intel Storage Matrix Manager info doesn't show up if a SATA CDROM is attached to any of the SATA ports. Why? Can I not use some of the ports for CDROM and some for RAID arrays? That sounds pretty ridiculous to me.

So, I configured one two drive array in RAID0. Then I reattached the CDROM drive so I could install Vista x86. Now, I can get Vista setup to start, but when I insert a USB stick with the RAID drivers on it, as soon I click Next after selecting the proper ESB2 driver, I get a BSOD saying "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" and "STOP: 0x0000000A". I don't know what the deal is. I have four sticks of Kingston FB-DIMMs and have tried only one and different ones. I have two Intel Xeon E5345 chips and I've tried each by themselves.

When a CDROM drive is attached, I get the AHCI BIOS screen which properly detects all attached drives (whether they are hard drives or CDROM), but the Intel Storage Matrix Manager screen never displays the arrays or the message to press CTRL-I for configuration.