Remember if you do both halves of your mirror on a single IDE controller then a fault on a disk interface can blow the whole thing in some circumstances.

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simon

The problem is that if a minor glitch happens, the RAID card has a fit at bootup, and says it's incorrectly configured, or an invalid RAID set, at which point you have to break the mirror and try and get back in with the intact half of the mirror, which is fraught with difficulties such as, er, it not working, which is where I'm at just now.

Ordinarily, without the "benefits" of the RAID system, the same glitch would give you some sort of error message from the OS, you'd reboot, run chkdsk, and all would be well. You might lose a file. As it is, I'm having to use the excellent File Scavenger which has so far offered a list of just over 150,000 files on the disc, for me to choose which ones I would like it to attempt to think about possibly trying to consider recovering.

I was planning to ditch the RAID anyway, it's just been forced on me a bit earlier than planned. The solution is to make regular backups and not worry about disc failure; so far the failures have been purely from the crapness of the RAID system, so it's kind of self-defeating.

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has a fit at bootup

That's not right - surely it should bring up the mirror as a degraded set. It's a bit pointless if it runs off and cries in the corner.

Maybe it's because you've striped and mirrored (RAID 10), or don't have a spare disk configured that can step in on failure.
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simon

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This is the same controller with the BIOS that has an option to keep the data on the RAID set when you delete the RAID set, except that at no point does it tell you that option will be presented to you, so unless you know about it, you're never likely to try the "Delete..." option as a path to rebuilding, despite it being the correct one.

I think I hashed that explanation up but you can probably work out what I mean.

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