I'm using onboard Sil3114 chip on K8N Neo-4 Platinum board and I did implement Raid-5 on it. Silicon provides software SATARAID5 to manage the raid(s). There is another onboard NVidia raid controller, I'm using it also, but the prob arrived with Silicon.
What I've done is created 2 Raid-5 arrays across 3 harddrives (the soft allows to allocate just part of a drive and then add them into Raid). It is possible I could have created one big RAID and then partitioned, but in fact my current approach has saved me some ham.
The PROBLEM: at some point I switched off my computer when it seemed to be hanging. That was a fatal mistake as now ONE OF my raids come up with a message. Warning: 'Group 0 "Notes" was not shut down properly' then Error: 'group "Notes" is offline: dirty and reduced'. So one of raids is dead (and the other is running nicely). Well i'm only so glad -- because for the other one -- one that keeps running, i did not have uptodate backups...
So I seem to have lost some data on the first Raid-5 (as my backup was not 100% fresh). Could I still do something? Problems:
1) I see no way to do anything with the failed raid group. It is not accessible -- I would have liked to start it even if some file may not be correct or at least delete it and create it fresh or something.
2) Silicon Image has no forum; they have some kind of "ask question" interface that just swallows questions and sends them to the black hole; their documentation does not talk about this kind of situation (nor it's much of a doc by any standards)
What drives me crazy is -- ALL drives are physically good, still i've lost ALL my data on Raid-5 (or so it seems; OK, minus my backup, but RAID-5 is supposed to have some value to preserve data, eh?). It seems the answer is -- do not use software Raid-5 (unless natively on Linux where you have more say about how it does run). Or it's maybe "do not use Silicon software raid"?
Any ideas how to:
1) start the raid group again (even if loosing some data on it)
2) remove the raid group (just the failing one)
3) get any info/support of Silicon Image controllers/software (in this or other newsgroup/forum?)
Thanks in advance.