Apologies - this is a little off-topic, but I am hoping that somebody else may have seen this same problem.

While waiting for the good folks at 3ware to finish their 4th July celebrations, I was wondering if anybody here has had a problem similar to this.

We have a 3ware 8506-8 SATA card fully loaded with 8 x Maxtor hard disks configured as RAID5, with a hot spare. It runs Debian Sarge and has worked 24x7 with no problems until we had an unexpected power outage yesterday. (A junior admin heard "Reboot the server" as "Hit the power switch." )

When booting the 3ware BIOS reports "Following drives will not be exported to OS", followed by a listing of each of the eight drives, each one of them marked "Incomplete", and then "3ware bios will not be installed".

If you press Alt-3 to go to the 3ware Disk Array Configuration screen then the drives are listed under the heading "Incomplete drives", but the RAID configuration that was defined is not listed. The Disk Array Config seems to be treating each drive as if they were each assigned to different RAID units.

The main OS is installed to a SCSI disk so we can at least boot and run the 3ware "tw_cli" tool. This reports the disks as being "OK", but with no "Units" defined. Each disk has it's "Unit" set to "-".

In a nutshell, it is as if the RAID configuration has been fragged, while the disk based metadata has been left behind in a state that says "I'm part of this array over there that you can't see any more, so leave me alone!"

3ware hint that there may be a way out of this in their knowledge base article 12544.

There is a mass of data in the array - enough to make a data restore a major PITA, so I am hoping that there is a "hack this, poke that, it will all come back" solution out there somewhere. (And, yes, I've Googled. So much that I am expecting a bill from them for overuse )

So, great Interweb, does this problem look familiar to anybody? And did you get a solution from 3ware?

(And by the way, this is the final straw that has broken this camel's hardware RAID back. I've had problems with various hardware RAID solutions. It's software RAID and LVM all the way for me from now on.)

Thanks!

And Double Thanks if you manage to resist the temptation not to flame me with "don't post this here"