Hello Everyone,

First let me start by saying that say any and all responses to the post are greatly appreciated, Thanx ALOT!

I have a DFI LAN PARTY SLI-DR mobo with onboard Silicon Image 3114 raid chipset (4 devices ) AND a onboard NVIDIA raid controller ( 4 more devices ). I installed 4 drives into this system, 1x120 gig drive as a boot drive and 3x250 gig Hitachi/IBM SATA 2.0 drives configuered in a raid 5 stripe. The motherboard maunal says that the Silicon Image raid controller supports 0,1,5 and JBOD. My plan was to install a dual boot Linux / Windows system on the 120 gig boot drive and store all data on the Hitachi raid 5 stripe. I figured since it is HARDWARE raid Linux would pick up the raid stripe and my data would be available in both LINUX and WINDOWS.

Reading thru the forums I have seen many other having problems with the Sil 3114 chipset but everyone seems to be trying to actually BOOT from the raid stripe. Anticipating that problem I have a seperate hard drive that I boot from and NOT from the raid stripe.

Here is the issue I am having / trying to address. I want to have access to my raid stripe in both Windows and Linux. Currently I have SUSE 10 installed on my Linux Partition and it sees the three raid drives as three individual drives and NOT as 1x500 gig raid 5 stripe. I cannot really experiment to much as there is active data on the raid stripe that I DONT want to loose. Looking in YAST I see that the sil3114_sata driver is loaded (at least for SUSE) but the raid stripe is NOT being seen. I guess, as others have said ,this is not a real hardware raid configuration, it is clearly depending on some software that windwos has and Linux does not (for the time being). Basically is what I am trying to do possible? Does it make sense that a raid stripe should be picked up by both windows and linux without any additional tweaking? SHOULD my raid stripe be seen by Linux? Or is it just NOT possible? If I used the NVIDIA raid instead of the sil 3114 raid would it make ANY difference?

I have so far tried SUSE 10, Redhat Fedora Core(4) and RedHat Enterprise(4) and none of them will acknowledge the raid stripe. It figures a windows only solution would gain popularity with the hardware vendors, what a surprise!

PS I am posting this at work when I get home I will paste the output of DMESG command. This is a truly annoying issue for me as I need to have access to the same data from both Windows and Linux. All other hardware is working like a champ under either OS.

The cost of a hardware RAID is around $300. No wonder none of your controllers is listed as RAID in SATA Linux status report. Linux can handle your software RAID in Windows compatible way, using dmraid.