Can't Restore RAID Using SIL3112A Chip

I am using TI on my new computer, and wanted to make sure the program would do a full restore of my RAID Array if I had a drive failure, or wanted to revert to the saved image for any reason. I am using the Western Digital Raptor 34.38gig SATA drives in a RAID 0 setup, which are shown by TI as a SCSI interface. The MB is a MSI RS480M2 using a Athlon64 X2 socket 939 processor. The computer has 2gigs of PC 3200 RAM.

The RAID chip on this MB is the SIL3112A SATA RAID Controller, BIOS Ver. 4.2.50. As I said it is striped array using a chunk size of 16.

The external drive holding the back-up image is a Toshiba MK2004GAL, connected via USB.

I bought a second pair of WD Raptors just so I could do this test and be certain TI would work. I install the new, clean and unformatted Raptors, go into the RAID BIOS and set up the array as described above, then boot with no problems into the TI Rescue disc.

I then click on "Restore Image", and chose the back-up file on the external Toshiba, which TI has no problem recognizing. This back-up is of my entire RAID array on the other pair of Raptors and consists of four partitions, the first of which is the "C" WindowsXP Pro bootable partition.

Now things start to screw-up.

Without the APIC Fix, TI says analyzing partitions and takes a long time to read the back-up on the Toshiba external. Around 10 minutes or so. But it does finally finish, and next gives me a choice of where to copy the back-up, but lists the RAID array as two separate SCSI drives, so it does not recognize the array.

With the APIC Fix, everything is the same but TI reads the partitions on the Toshiba external drive very quickly, like less than a minute. Still it shows my RAID as 2 SCSI drives at the destination choice.

In researching before I bought this MSI MB, I thought TI supported the SIL3112A RAID chip. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks to anyone who can give me some help. Mark

PS: I need to add I am using the latest build 937, with a rescue disc created with that build.

 

Have you tried restoring the image to the first drive showing from the array? Isn't that board using an integrated ATI SATA controller?

TI is well known for problems with various RAID sets, but I've had no troubles here with Promise and VIA chips.

 

Hello agpts,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please create Acronis Report and Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

Please also do the following:

- Launch Acronis Report Utility once again and select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;
- Boot the computer from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;
- Collect the report file from the floppy;
- Rename the report created from under Windows to report_win.txt and report created using the bootabale floppy to report_diskette.txt.

Send all the collected files to support@acronis.com along with the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov