HELP: switched from RAID to AHCI and back and now boot drive not detected by BIOS.

I had a boot drive failure and had to reinstall windows 7 on a new drive. That went relatively smoothly but then the secondary SSD, a Samsung 850 Evo was no longer recognized in BIOS. So I pulled all of the drives and with only that drive installed assumed I could get away with switching from RAID to AHCI to see if it would be recognized in AHCI as though maybe it was a RAID issue as the replacement boot drive is identical. BIOS did recognize it so I attempted to clean it and then switch back to RAID to see if it would be recognized at that point. It still isn't recognized. So I pulled that out and reinstalled the boot drive and now the boot drive is no longer recognized in RAID!

How do I get out of this mess?

Only lead I have so far is to reinstall windows all over again in AHCI?

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...i/4c94f678-6bd1-48a6-b871-8872c841023a?auth=1

All of this after waiting for hours to get Win7 to download all of the updates and reinstalling all of the programs. This really sucks.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

Well the good news is that my 2nd SSD is recognized now in AHCI and still has all of the data on it. I'm not seeing a difference in boot times and Crystal Disk Mark just returned identical performance figures vis a vis RAID.

If the only advantage of AHCI is the ability to do a RAID set up in the future without reinstalling the OS I suppose I am ok with AHCI.

 

Now that I've installed the Atheros PCIE driver the computer doesn't see the 2nd SSD again. WTF.

 

In fact this is what happened the first time, why is the driver doing this?

 

Performing system restore before the Atheros Ethernet Controller driver and the drive is visible again. It has to be one of the updates.

Also, running Crystal Disk Mark on that drive has returned really low scores, like 150MBPs Read / Write which should be 550/500 MBPS.

Edit:

I updated the firmware by way of Samsung Magician yet it's still saying "Your SSD is connected through SATA 1 port".

Which doesn't make any sense as there are only Sata 2 and 3 on the computer.

Maybe it's the Intel Rapid Storage driver that I'm installing that's creating the problem.

Edit:

I've narrowed it down to the Intel Rapid Storage Driver. After installing that the driver disappears completely, and I mean it isn't visible in Either Disk Management, elevated command prompt "Diskpart" > "list disk nor BIOS.

I guess I will pull everything off of it that is important at SATA 1 speed and possibly contact the manufacturer for warranty support.

I don't know what else to do.

 

Well on an extremely positive note, now that I'm in AHCI mode I can enable "RAPID" mode in Samsung Magician and I'm seeing nearly 6GBPS read and writes! 2nd 850 Evo, which is connected to the SATA 3 slot on the SATA strip showing up as SATA 1 and 130 KBPS read and write is beyond me though.