A couple of days ago I found myself in a similar situation.  I have a Windows 7 machine with 3 Western Digital hard drives totaling 2.5 TB.  The operating system is installed the first disk (500 GB) and I store all my important data on a second (1 TB) disk.  Finally, the last disk (also 1 TB) is used for backing up my data.  Over the last few years I’ve accumulated over 500 GB worth of pictures and videos, and I’ve grown increasingly weary of holding it on a single non-redundant drive.  I’ve searched far and wide for a reliable and convenient back-up solution (that would make a good subject for another post), and ultimately came up short, so I finally resorted to setting up a RAID array.  I have a Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard with Intel’s P965+ ICH8R chipset with RAID support (Intel® Rapid Storage Technology).  So, during Black Friday frenzy I grabbed a new 1 TB WD Caviar Black ($60 at Best Buy!) and a couple weeks later found the time to set things up.  That’s when I ran into the snag described above.

It turns out that the boot-up failure is caused by the lack of appropriate RAID drivers during Windows start-up.  I visited Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology (RST) support website, where I found some information about adding the RAID drivers during Windows installation, which was not very helpful in my situation.  However, Intel’s site also mentions that on Windows 7 it is no longer required to install the RAID drivers during setup (F6), because the driver is already included with the operating system.  If that’s true, I figured, it is possible that the driver gets installed with the operating system and is simply disabled, if it is not required.  After some more digging online I found this site, which describes a couple of methods of enabling Intel’s RAID driver by editing the Windows registry (first method, second method).  At the bottom of the first post I found following procedure:

1. With RAID disabled, boot into Windows and start Regedit.exe
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorV
3. In the right-hand column, you should see a value named Start. Double-click this entry and change the data from 1 to 0.
4. Reboot with RAID enabled – Windows should load just fine. Now install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager as you usually would. This time around, it should detect your hardware and install without any issues.

In my registry, under Services, I found two entries iaStor and iaStorV.  Under the former the Start value was already set to 0, while in the later Start was set to 3.  If you are curious about the significance of these different values, you can read a brief summary on Microsoft Support site.  The Start value determines when a given service (in this case, driver) is started, and to be started at boot time, a service must have a setting of 0.  If you would like to learn more about Windows services (and a whole lot more about the internal details of the OS) get a copy of Mark Russinovich’s “Windows Internals”.  Changing the Start value under iaStorV to 0 did the trick.  After rebooting my machine and enabling RAID in the BIOS, I was up and running.

That was it – plain and simple!  I could only wish this information was more prominently emphasized as took me a while to dig it up.  There are just two more things to mention.  First, Intel seems to have renamed their Windows software for configuring the RAID controller from Matrix Storage Manager (as it is referred to in the above procedure) to Rapid Storage Technology.  Second, after you reboot your system and enable RAID in the BIOS, you will be presented with the RAID configuration utility during startup.  I would advise you not to use it to create an array.  Instead, wait until the system fully boots and use the RST software, which gives you an option to migrate your data from a single drive to a newly created array.  In fact, it does so in the background, even as you continue to use the computer.  Pretty sweet!  Of course, you should always back up your data before configuring your RAID array.

Quick Update: After writing this post I had a nagging feeling that I had gone through a similar procedure before.  Well, it turns out that I had, indeed.  I even chose to describe it in one of my earlier posts.  That time the problem was switching from IDE to AHCI, but the symptoms were identical and the solution quite similar.

The out-of-the box library functionality is quite flexible and probably sufficient for many folks, but because I am a pendantic person and like to have things my way I had to resort to a few tweaks to make my libraries work just right.  The rest of this post describes my configuration, offers some tips and tricks, and lists certain limitations that I encountered.  I got my introduction from a post on The Windows Blog.  There are also a handful of introductory videos on MSDN Channel 9 on this topic (Find and Organize – Part 1, Empower Users with Libraries, and Find and Organize – Part 2)

First, my configuration.  I like to keep my data separate from the operating system as much as possible, so I store all my media and documents on a different hard drive.  This allows me to periodically wipe out the system drive and install the system from scratch, without worrying about my data.  On that data drive (H: in my case) I have a folder for my wife’s music (H:\Heather\Media\Music) and my own music (H:\Andrew\Media\Music).  I also have one folder for shared music (H:\Shared\Media\Music) and one more for my Zune subscription music (H:\Andrew\Media\Zune\Audio).

I started up by setting up separate Windows accounts for myself and my wife.  Each account’s Music library comes preconfigured to include that user’s “My Music” folder.  In my case, I needed to move each user’s “My Music” folder from its default location (C:\Users\<Username>\Music) to the corresponding location on the data drive.  It turns out that Explorer (finally) offers a straightforward way to achieve this.  You simply need to open a user profile folder (easily accessible from the Start Menu), select “My Music” folder as shown in the picture below and open up the properties of that folder.

Typical Content of a User Profile Folder

In the properties dialog box you can find a “Location” tab (see below), which contains a “Move…” button.  Clicking the button opens another dialog box in which you can conveniently type a desired new location for your “My Music” folder.  Once you do this you will be asked if you want to move the content of the current folder to the new one.  I recommend that you do that because otherwise Windows will simply abandon your original “My Music” folder, and you will see two “My Music” folders under your profile, which is utterly confusing.

My Music Properties - Location Tab

I owe you a word of caution here.  It appears that if any of your libaries includes a folder on a non-system drive, that drive must be connected for Explorer to work correctly.  If you shut down your machine, remove the drive, and restart, you will no longer be able to open any Explorer windows.  If you try to start Explorer, instead of the expected folder view, you will experience a small delay followed by a ominous error message “Server execution failed.”  The only way to recover is to reconnect the driver or perhaps edit the offending library file.  That is certainly an inconvenience and I would hope Explorer would be more resilient in this situation.

Having taken care of mine and my wife’s “My Music” folders, I know needed to add the shared music folder to both our libraries.  Adding a folder is easily accomplished by browsing to the desired folder and clicking “Include in Library” toolbar button.  After you do this and chose the target library, the library will display items from your folder.  If you previously chose to share your libraries with the HomeGroup you may be asked if you want to share the newly added folder.  I will devote a separate post to the subject of library and folder sharing a little later.

Now, when you expand the library in the left Explorer bar, you will see the newly added folder.  The name shown in the Explorer bar is the name of the folder.  But what if that name is not particularly descriptive?  In my case the folder containing shared music is simply called “Music” because it already resides in a folder called “Shared”.  What if I wanted it to show as “Shared Music” in my library?  Well, it turns out that libraries don’t offer a mechanism for aliasing folder names, which I think is unfortunate.  You are left with two options.  First, you can rename the actual folder.  Second, you can trick Explorer by including a hidden Desktop.ini file in your folder.  I chose the latter.

To make this approach work you can copy Desktop.ini from your “My Music” folder and alter the first line to make the whole thing look as follows.  The added bonus of doing so is that your folder will display with the musical note icon instead of the generic one, much like your “My Music” folder.

[.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=Shared Music
InfoTip=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-12689
IconResource=%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll,-108
IconFile=%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll
IconIndex=-237

Note also that in order for Explorer to use your Desktop.ini file, the folder that contains it must be marked as read-only.  This restriction applies to that folder only, and has no impact on the files and folders contained within.  To apply the read-only attribute to a folder use the attrib command from the command prompt as follows.

attrib +r <Folder Name>

I applied this trick to both my shared music and my Zune audio folder, which made Explorer display my Music Library as shown in the picture below.

My Music Library

Intrigued by the apparent lack of aliasing and curious as to why certain folders displayed with the drive letter and others didn’t I decided to delve a bit deeper.  The Libraries Under the Hood post on The Windows Blog indicates that libraries are described in XML files with library-ms extension and located in %AppData%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries.  The post also gives an overview of the library file schema.  The complete schema (with a typically laconic description) can be found in Library Description Schema article on MSDN.  A brief look at the schema confirms that there indeed isn’t any means of aliasing a folder name directly in the library.  A second look reveals that the actual library locations are stored in a serialized base-64 encoded form.  This is unfortunate because it effectively prevents the user from editing the file directly.  I’m actually curious what the content of that string is and I’ll have to decode it to take a peek.

Armed with this knowledge I decided to do a little forensic investigation on my own library files.  In fact, I looked at them several times while I was adding folders to my own and my wife’s Music Libraries.  In the process, I observed that the <url> element of the <simpleLocation>element takes one of three forms a) absolute local path (e.g. H:\Shared\Media\Music), b) network path (e.g. \\MyComputer\Shared Music), or c) known folder reference (e.g. knownfolder:{FDD39AD0-238F-46AF-ADB4-6C85480369C7}).  Curiously enough, exactly which form is chosen seems to be arbitrary.  I’d love to learn what algorithm is used to determine which form is stored, and whether it has any impact on how the location is accessed by the library.

One final note about the library files.  If you manipulate them by hand, be sure to bump the value of the <version> element.  This prompts the interested applications (e.g. Explorer or Windows Media Player) to pick up your changes.

I’ll end with a few remarks about certain shortcomings or potential improvements of the libraries feature.

Because libraries are a brand new feature in Windows 7, not all applications know how to take advantage of them.  Even Microsoft’s own products don’t always support them.  Zune software, for one, doesn’t allow me to choose a library as a location to monitor for music files.  Instead, I had to explicitly add all folders contained in the library.

Once you set up your libraries, you will notice that they can be conveniently arranged by certain commonly used properties, such artist or album for music files.  The default settings are useful enough, but it would be even better if the list could be extended to other properties that are indexed by the Windows Indexing Service.  For example, if you enjoy classical music, the performing artist may not be the most relevant attribute of the files in your collection, and you may want to arrange your library by composer, instead.  Unfortunately, that is not possible (at least from the Explorer).  There may be a registry setting somewhere, but I haven’t found one so far.

When I relocated my personal music folders to my data drive, I considered moving the public folders there also and using them as the location for my shared media.  It turned that the matter is more complicated than with personal libraries.  First, Explorer doesn’t provide a convenient Location tab in its Property pages where you could enter a new target path.  You can work around this by tweaking the registry, but with one caveat described shortly.  Under the registry key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders” you can find entries for all your libraries (e.g. CommonMusic).  You change the path for any of them to effectively move the library to a different folder.  Incidentally, there is a different key called “Shell Folders” under the same path, which presumably stores the system default paths, in case you’d like to restore them.  Now, the caveat.  After I used this method to reloacte my public music library, I observed an incosistent behavior between Explorer and Windows Media Player.  When I opened my music library dialog box in Explorer, it would show the correct path to my shared music, which was also the location of the public music folder.  On the other hand, Windows Media Player continued to display the original location (C:\Users\Public\Music).  It also appeared as though the original folder kept getting recreated when I restarted the machine.  I found this very confounding and ultimately decided to reset the public folders to their defaults. 

I suspect this strange behavior is the result of the known folder settings in the registry under “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Folder Descriptions”.  After digging around a bit I located the CommonMusic folder and noticed that it has a Parent entry along with a RelativePath entry.  The Parent value points to another known folder called Public, which by default is located at “C:\Users\Public”, and the RelativePath is set to “Music”.  So if the CommonMusic is moved to a new location (in my case “H:\Shared\Media\Music”) some ambiguity arises.  An application can take the path from CommonMusic under “User Shell Folders”, or it can construct it by taking the loaction of the Public known folder and appending the relative path from the CommonMusic known folder, thus obtaining “C:\Users\Public\Music”.  In addition, there is a PreCreate value under the CommonMusic known folder.  It’s value is set to 1, which may explain why the original folder kept reappearing after restart.  The per-user known folders, such as “My Music” don’t have the Parent value, which is probably why they can be moved safely and don’t lead to this confusion.

All in all, I find libraries to be a very welcome and useful feature, but there still remain some wrinkles to be ironed out.

Intel warns (see here and here) that switching to AHCI after you have installed Windows on a SATA drive in IDE mode is not supported and may result in a blue screen and system shutdown.  I tried, and indeed a blue screen was what I saw.  At that point I was begining to contemplate reinstalling my recently set up Windows 7, but luckily I postponed that decision for a little while.  A few days later I stumbled upon an article on Microsoft’s support site, which explains a very simple registry change, which allows Windows to boot just fine after switching the system drive to AHCI.  It turns out that the only piece missing is a Microsoft AHCI driver (msahci.sys), which Windows doesn’t automatically load during the boot sequence unless an AHCI disk was present when Windows was being installed.

After the change to AHCI, when Windows first boots (and loads the driver) it will detect a “new device” and prompt to restart the computer.  Once all that is done, you can download Intel’s Matrix Storage Manager, which will install its own AHCI/RAID driver and require another restart.

I later discovered other articles describing different procedures to accomplish the same result, but I still find Microsoft’s the easiest.