Re: Problem with new RAID card?

I have now wasted an entire week trying, without any success, to get this damned card to work.

Two long calls to tech support. Tried the new 1.8.3 drivers and firmware, and then reverted back to the original 1.8 firmware. They have no idea why it doesn't work.

With a single drive JBOD configured, the system will boot fine.

With a 4 drive RAID 5 array configured it will not boot at all. I just get the chime, followed by a grey screen and a single beep from the Caldigit card. After 30 seconds or so I get a flashing folder with a question mark. I have reset the PRAM about 20 times over the past few days.

Booting from an external firewire drive, once the o/s has loaded, I can see all the data on the RAID 5 array. The partition is GUID and all permissions are fine. I have tried restoring the o/s multiple times from a firewire drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper and the OS X Disk Utility Restore function. Each attempt was with a freshly created array (which takes 3 hours to initialize), and a full system restore of 151Gb, so each doomed attempt takes around 7 soul-destroying hours.

Booting from the OS X DVD, the system cannot see the Caldigit RAID at all. Booting and holding down Option, the Caldigit RAID does not appear as a potential startup drive.

I have spent the entire week trying absolutely everything I can think of to make this work, but now I'm completely out of ideas, short of returning the card.