Quoting Tony White (tony@ycs.com.au):
Hi Rick, No issue, I was only looking for a direction to work on rather than someone give me a direct detailed approach. I was hoping there was a document somewhere that may relate to this problem that I could read. I did not detail the items involved because I had suspected it would a general issue where if anyone had upgraded from an IDE to a RAID they might have found a cure and pointed me to the page/doc.
So more details...
0. Adaptec ASR-2405 ROHS RAID controller also tried Adaptec 1210A and 2420A
I second Craig's comments (for which, much thanks, Craig). To elaborate, inexpensive RAID HBAs tend to be what are generically called 'fakeraid' devices, which are essentially proprietary software RAID with a motherboard BIOS assist for configuration and to support booting. Athough each separate manufacturer implementaton is different (and thus non-portable, etc.) and I referred to it as 'proprietary' formatting, most (including Adaptec's 'HostRAID' series) are documented well enough that Red Hat employee Heinz Mauelshagen's dmraid (Device Mapper RAID) tool can create/remove and manage them: http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dmraid/readme Manufacturer-specific fakeraid's performance and reliability lags compared to what you get using native Linux 'md' software RAID, so I'd personally wipe and start over. The only exception is where you need to dual-boot with MS-Windows and both Linux and MS-Windows must both be able to able to mount the RAID array natively. (In general, though, dual boot sucks compared to concurrent OS usage with the help of your choice of virtual machine software, so I urge the latter over dual boot except in outlier exceptional cases.) Back in the day, when SATA was brand new and there was almost no Linux documentation about Linux drivers for SATA chipsets, I created this page that had a great deal to say about particular HBAs being fakeraid: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html As noted at the top, said page is now about eight years out of date, but many general observations on it still apply.