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Question

Silicone Image Raid 5 not recognized

Jul 18, 2011 6:51AM PDT

Win XP SP3; Intel 8400 dual core; 2 gig RAM; Have 4 HDD plus put Sil Image 3124 Raid Controller in PCI slot. Three 2 TB WD Green drives connected to the Raid controller, plus 4 more HDD to motherboard SATA connections. I first formatted each 2TB drive, then connected to Sil Image Raid controller and told it to set up a Raid 5 Parity array (3 ea 2TB drives should give 4TB Raid 5 available). That took 4 days. Finally says it completed the task. I boot Win expecting to see it - nothing. Doesn't show up in Explore, not in Disk Management. Sil Image Software says it's good to go, it just isn't there. Check BIOS - Does not show up as a drive, but interesting the Raid controller card is listed as a possible boot drive??? Check System - Hardware - Device Manager. It's listed under SCSI and Raid controllers and says it's working and driver is fine. It is also listed under Disk Drives, but Volumes is blank, when I populate it says Status Unknown, Disk Unreadable, 0 available. Using 3 each 2TB drives in a Raid 5 should give me 4 TB available??? Going back to software under Program, it shows up, shows is Raid 5, but under Raid Group tab there's an option Bring Raid Group Online, but it is grayed out. Any help? BIOS, software, Windows, Disk Management - can't find anything to make it active or bring it online.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Given the age of the OS and
Jul 18, 2011 7:27AM PDT

No story about how you partitioned and formatted the RAID I'm left with more questions than answers.

Maybe it's back to the maker to ask them what's wrong?
Bob

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Can't format if I can't find it!
Jul 18, 2011 9:51AM PDT

I thought creating the Raid array was in essence formatting. Don't know as this is my first Raid endeavor. Still, I can't find it anywhere to partition (one large partition desired), and can't format if it doesn't show up on Disk Manager or anywhere. I've worked with single drives and had to Active them, then Format them, etc, but while the Raid controller shows up in several places, nothing shows up as a drive or array. I've tweaked and rebooted several times, etc. Silicone Image says they don't support consumers and Fry's didn't help. I'm usually fairly good at computer stuff and a resource for others, but this has me stumped. I may give up and just make it Pass Through, which will give me 6 TB of storage, but no backup in case of a drive failure. I tried MiniTool Data Recovery as the controller showed up there similar to a drive, but it found only a single 2TB drive and started to scan and maybe recover data. I figured that would be the one 2TB drive I started with before trying Raid and it could find some files that were on it prior to formatting. It was acting like it was pass through to a single drive instead of a Raid array. I didn't want to mess up the Raid, so I stopped the scan before it could make any changes. I would have thought the Raid array would show up as a single drive with a single name/designation - then I could Activate, Format, or do whatever necessary to use the array. But it doesn't show up anywhere useable.

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Then it's defective.
Jul 18, 2011 9:54AM PDT

Or the install instructions are bad.

Return the RAID controller as defective since you followed the instructions.
Bob