I have been using a Koutech IO-PSA421 PCI-X SATA II Controller Card for about 7 months with no problem. I have four 500GB Seagate drives attached to the device and configured as RAID 10. Tech support tells me it's implemented as RAID0 plus RAID1, so Drive 0 and 1 are a stripe set which is mirrored to drives 2 and 3.
The motherboard is a Supermicro X5DAE and have been booting from the card.
After shutting down the computer and leaving it off all last night, I was unable to start it again: "Operating System Not Found." In the BIOS screen for the RAID controller, I can see that the card has access to all four drives. Drive 1, however is tagged as "Invalid raid drive." The others show as "reserved." Tech support tells me that "reserved" is OK and means that the drive is part of an existing set.
Things I have tried:
1) Booting with the Ultimate Boot CD. The environment never quite comes up. I get the desktop, but no taskbar or icons, no listing of available drives, almost as if it got stuck looking. I did load the controller's drivers during boot.
2) Booting with the Windows XP CD. The drive does not show up in the recovery console. Card drivers were loaded during boot.
3) Swapping cable locations - plugging drives 0/1 into slots 2/3 and vice versa.
4) Booting with only drives 2/3 attached.
5) Booting with only drives 0/1 attached.
6) Installing an IDE drive to boot from and then installing the card drivers. I got a clean install. Windows recognized the raid card when it was attached and the drivers appear to have been loaded correctly. The drive shows up in the device manager and says it is working properly. However, there are no lettered drives corresponding to the raid set, and no drives available to be mounted from XP disk management.
Tech support is sending a new card to rule out a hardware problem.
What is the best way to recover the use of the raid set without losing data?
