I have six identical SATA drives and a hot swap bay. Four of the drives do not show up in BIOS but Linux can see them. After booting and seeing them in Linux I can reboot and they appear in BIOS. I've gotten the same results with different towers and 3 different SATA PCI cards. Under Linux I can build partitions and copy data to/from them no problem but I can't use them for a Windows system unless I boot with the live Ubuntu CD, let them appear in the OS, and then reboot.

Does anyone have any idea what Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) might be doing to get them to show up? All I can come up with is that these 4 drives were in a FakeRAID 5 array once upon a time (Ubuntu 7.10).

Actually I suspect you can see all of them but confused by the fact that your RAID isn't recognised universally by every OS.

It is possible that you have arranged the RAID with the Bios making only the isolated disks seen in certain Bios page and those attached as RAID in another Bios page.

The Linux actually failed to recognise the RAID and treats every disk individually. On a hot boot your RAID information may be able to pass from system to system. Your Windows system may see less number of disks but the total disk storage could be supported by all the 6 disks involved.

I don't have an answer as I steer away from the RAID after experiencing difficulties and confusions from putting different OSes on it. What I am sure is if you break up the RAID then all the disks will have no problem of being seen by every OS.

Maybe I wasn't very clear with it. No matter what configuration I use (RAID, IDE emu, or normal SATA) none of these 4 drives will appear in my BIOS from a cold boot. I've tried different towers, different SATA PCI cards, and even my eSATA toaster.

BUT if I boot up from a Live Linux CD they will appear and then show up in BIOS if I warm boot. Meaning that I can set up a RAID array, I can install Windows, I can use them just as though nothing was wrong *until I shut my PC off*. Then they're just "gone" until I boot from a Live Linux CD and reboot. I know I'm not crazy.

And it really bothers me because that's 2GB of space I could be using. Any guesses anyone?

Your bios or at least the part that is part of the raid array is loosing it's power on power off.

Are they add on cards or built in?

Jefro, what you suggest would make sense if it was simply losing the RAID configuration. But in different towers with various PCI/PCIe SATA cards (as well as my SATA toaster connected via USB) it has to be the drives. I have a few other drives of the same model that work just dandy and have never given me problems. Absolutely without question these drives cannot be "seen" by BIOS or Windows until Linux "magically" initializes them.

A friend of mine dug deeper on this and found that it's a known issue with HighPoint RAID controllers and Western Digital drives. The HighPoint makes a non-reversable change in the drive's firmware that keeps it from spinning up until it's sent a wakeup command (which Linux does but BIOS and Windows do not). HighPoint says it's not their problem (other drives don't do it) and WD will just RMA the drive.

Apparently, my drives were toasted before I'd ever put them in the Linux software RAID...I just didn't know it.