Seems like a few feathers have been ruffled, if my statement offended anyone or encroached on forum etiquette it might have been more tactful to just delete it and let me know why in a PM.

No feathers ruffled, Dee. The post "as is" is acceptable. Torrents exist and users here may choose to participate in them according to their own set of standards of what is and is not acceptable. I just can't let you take the next step of explaining how in a post. That would have me in hot water and might jeopardize the existence of the board.

No problem Arlie, the last thing I would ever want to do would be to jeapordise anything to do with this forum. I wasn't aware of restrictions and me being my usual self and offering help didn't realise the implications. I consider myself told off and gaurantee it won't happen again.

Thanks for the help everyone!

Here's my current status. I installed Ubuntu, and could get to everything except the striped array on the SiI. Due to some unrelated issues I had with Ubuntu, I turned off the SiI in BIOS, removed all cards that I don't really need, and tried again to install Windows. It still didn't see my drives.

I installed Fedora Core 8 x86_64, and so far I've been quite please with it, although I haven't turned the SiI back on. I have installed VMware, and expect to turn on the SiI, and try File Scavenger under VMware.

Thanks for the confirmation that File Scavenger works for other folks, too!

David

I tried to add the SiI RAID as a hardware disk under VMware, and got a error (I don't recall the specific error at the moment). Looks like that won't work.

There is something else that some folks have had success with over in the Asus forum. Some folks have had trouble with Windows exhibiting frequent hangs and BSOD. They found that removing the battery from the motherboard, setting the CMOS reset jumper, and rebooting was useful. They configured the CMOS again after doing this, and the hangs and BSOD's went away.

This seems very strange to me. There is CMOS that is user configurable, and you can see the values it holds when you boot the BIOS. It seems very strange to me that other parts of the CMOS should affect the running of the computer - I wonder what could be stored there.

At any rate, it appears that the BIOS on flash is protected by a checksum, so it's unlikely that it is bad. Maybe a hard reset of my CMOS would be useful.

Are you sure you're trying to load the linux drivers for the Sil Image controller?

I'm still struggling as to why you can't reinstall XP, which would be the surest way to get to the data on your Sil Image raid.

Can you try the following for me and follow these instructions with no shortcuts to prevent any potential damage to your LINUX install. Unplug all of the SATA drives from their controllers. Unplug power to all SATA drives as well. Take your old IDE drive and put it in the system. Make sure its jumper is set to "Master". Make sure you use a HDD IDE cable and not an optical drive cable and plug the drive into the end of the cable farthest away from the motherboard (i.e. do not use the middle connector. Don't forget to power the drive. Boot and verify that BIOS sees the IDE drive. Turn off the Sil Image controller. Power down. Drop in the XP CD and attempt the install on this drive. When you reach the point in the install where it asks for the drive on which you want to install, you should see one and only one drive. If you see multiple logical disks, delete those partitions using the options provided and format the entire drive. If it hangs up here, please be very specific about what you see on screen. Once the install completes, we can work on getting to the raid.

With regards to BSOD's and CMOS resets, that is usually the cure for a bad overclock or a situation where a user has played around with BIOS settings he/she should not have touched without more research. If you've been in BIOS playing around, then a CMOS reset may be in order. If you need detailed settings after the reset, let us know and we'll provide them for you.

Sorry for not getting back to you on this sooner - the bottom line is that I have recovered my data, and am still puzzled about the issues with Windows.

I was able to recover the data in the following way. I created a VM using VMware Workstation, and installed WinXP in that. I was not able to map the striped array to a virtual disk, but was able to map the two component disks to virtual disks. Inside the VM, I used iRecover software (purchased, and well worth it!) to determine the precise RAID configuration and recover the data.

If these problems were really software glitches rather than hardware, I'm more comfortable with Linux than Windows. In my experience, it has been more stable, and I understand its logging, error handling, and in general, its functioning, better than Windows.

I found that I can run Photoshop CS3 within a virtual machine hosted by VirtualBox, and with the guest additions (drivers in the VM) installed, I have color management.

I would still like to have a better understanding of what happened, but now it's a little bit more academic.

Thank you for all your help! I'm glad that I did not return the board, and have the same problems with a replacement.

David

I am very glad to hear that all ended well. I am still very puzzled as to why you could not reinstall XP. I am starting to suspect that you may have a defective CD. Microsoft will replace that free of charge.

Closed thread for now, feel free to open up another in the event you have any more issues.