I have a friend with a G4/533 MP who has a RAID 1 (mirrored) set up on two 120GB Seagates and two 160GB Seagates through a SIIG rebadge of the AEC-6880M RAID card which has a firmware update supporting RAID 1. Now the problem is that upon boot up, he can log in and everything, he gets an everlasting beachball once the 120GB icon (master drive with system) loads with the desktop. This seemed to happen overnight - or so he tells me.
Now when he boots off of any given CD to run DFA, DiskWarrior, whatever, the computer will not detect either array.
This is the confusing part - whether the problem is with the card, or whether the drives have gone kaput. My experience with IDE controllers is that they are fairly resilient, and the drives in question are less than four months old, so I'm not really inclined to believe that they are dead so quickly after installation. I am thinking that this problem is something simple, like a misaligned IDE cable or a ATA card coming unseated in the PCI slot.
So the questions are: is it at all possible to just suck the data off of the drives by taking a drive from each array, connecting them to one bus, and using the RAID controller as just a standard IDE controller? Also, is it inadvisable to run an OS off of a hardware RAID?
In my experience on the PC side it was never an issue but it was suggested that on a mac this might cause problems. Doesn't really make any sense to me, but maybe it will to someone more familiar with RAID on this side of things.
Any help would be appreciated grealy.
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