> am sorry to hear that. Well at least we tried.
>I wish you luck in your pursuit!
Problem solved!
I blew off the rest of the afternoon, and took advantage of the near perfect weather here in Twin Mountain to 'Take a Hike!'
I thought about it while walking, and decided to do what (in retrospect) I should have done in the first place.
When I bought the cards, I had also purchased two (actually 4, since I intend to RAID both front-line machines) for it.
Up to this point, I had been installing a couple of old drives that had developed errors on them, but were still alive; they both reported themselved to the standard IDE BIOS when booting, and correctly identified themseves as to type and size (I set the BIOS to auto, rebooted, and all the params came up correct). One had massive read errors in the inner 3rd of the disk, the other would give seek errors, but they still were alive and saluting the BIOS at startup.
Now, at this point, I knew that:
The SIl Bios wouldn't recognize F3 and enter the BIOS with no drives attached.
Ditto with one drive attached.
Ditto with two drives attached.
I had been using the bad drives (again, one with simple bad sectors, one with seeks errors) because, this being my first foray into RAID, I didn't know what to expect; reading documentation is one thing, DOING is another. I thought I'd play with disposable parts first.
So, just for grins and giggles, I got out two of the new drives and plugged them in, one set as master on each channel.
Mirabile Dictu! ... it alive!
Hitting <F3> enters the BIOS, and the 2 drives are correctly recognized as to mfr and ID/capacity.
Now the fun begins
I added a floppy drive to the testbed, and inserted a bootable disk.
I set up a simple mirrored array of two drives (which was the goal in the first place)
It works, at this point I am booting to the floppy only.
I pull one of the drives - it works (recognizes the remaining drive), boot to floppy
I pull both drives - it doesn't work, BIOS doesn't respond to <F3>, but boots to floppy.
I add the 'bad sector' drive. BIOS responds to <F3>, shows correct drive ID/capacity
I tried to delete the RAID set, no go.
remove drive, substitute 'bad seek' drive. Hangs in RAID BIOS, won't respond to <F3>, won't proceed to floppy boot.
Add both bad drives, ditto.
remove really bad ;-) drive, responds as previous, boots to floppy.
Still won't allow deletion of RAID array.
Connect 2 good drives
Drive recognizes array.
Delete RAID set
Interesting anomaly:
Drives now show up as TWO raid sets, each of one drive.
Trying to delete these one-member RAID sets accomplishes nothing, typing in a RAID set # causes it to just keep asking.
Re-creating the RAID set combines the two 1-member RAID sets.
So, from this I gather that:
These RAID ctlrs aren't particularly intelligent, and don't handle error conditions very well.
I was surprised that it/they needed a good pair of drives to establish the RAID set, then had mediocre error handling capability after that.
OTOH, there's an old adage that goes;
'Don't test for an error condition you're not prepared to handle'.
Oh, well, I got the ctlrs for cheap, so it's the exposition of the another old adage:
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR
OTOH, in navigating to get here I just read a post/thread about a gut who had a disaster on a Linux RAID5 array.
Perhaps price has nothing to do with the quality of the S/W?
All in all, I'd rather have spent the time hiking ;-) or is that ;-(
Thanks to Mike for doing the research on the ctlr, I did get newer , and more elaborate, versions of the docs.