The machine on which I installed Vista has an SATA RAID 1 array managed by my Intel motherboard’s on-board SATA controller. Unfortunately, the motherboard (a D865PERL) is based on the 865PE chipset, which uses the 82801ER (ICH5R) I/O controller hub for the RAID array, and the ICH5R’s RAID drivers don’t officially support Vista (the next-gen ICH6R does have RAID drivers for Vista).

Fortunately, the last ICH5R-compatible version of Intel’s RAID driver (Intel Matrix Storage Manager 5.5) does work with Vista. Or at least, it works for me. I grabbed the “Floppy Configuration Utility – Intel Matrix Storage Manager” download from Intel’s site, imaged a 3.5″ disk, inserted it during the Vista install, and it’s worked like a champ.

I’m blogging this for posterity as I didn’t find a lot of information when I Googled about this stuff.

UPDATE: Using this driver caused my system to blue-screen two or three times a day. Vista mis-reported the issue to me as a video driver problem, so I didn’t put two and two together. Use this driver at your peril; I’m reverting back to a non-Vista OS on the affected machine as Intel continues to state that the IC5HR is unsupported on Vista.

I recently installed Vista Enterprise RTM on a system I built a few years back. Vista failed to recognize my Linksys PCI Wireless card and my motherboard’s AC-97 audio chipset, but when I ran Windows Update it automatically downloaded the drivers, installed them, and rebooted.

Oh wait. It didn’t reboot. The hardware… just started working. Sixteen years of rebooting after every single update, trivial or otherwise, have finally come to an end. Yay!