I built my desktop back in 2009 and it has served me well. However, I decided that a dual-core machine with 4 GB of RAM just really wasn’t cutting it in 2015. Flush with Christmas cash, I upgraded to an eight-core CPU and 16 GB of RAM. This also meant bringing a new motherboard along for a ride. Like my old motherboard, this new one was a Gigabyte product (GA-78LMT-S2P, specifically), so I figured life would be pretty simple.

After work, I yanked the old parts out and inserted the new. I booted the new machine and made sure the BIOS settings were just how I wanted them. I let it boot and…

Crap. It got stuck at “Verifying DMI Pool Data”. For a long time. I did some searching and most of the answers I found suggested that the answer was one of a bad SATA cable, a bad SATA port, or a bad disk. None of these seemed to be the case, as the RAID utility found all four drives. But wait, I have five. Two smaller drives in a RAID 1 for my OS and local files, and a 3×1 TB (software) RAID 5 for data.

Therein lies the solution: by setting SATA ports 4/5 to RAID instead of IDE mode, the computer booted right up. I leave this here as a marker for anyone else who happens to come across this problem (or myself if I repeat it in another six years). As an aside, this is the first time I’ve played with hardware in a few years. I kind of missed it a little, tiny bit.