OK, so the general consensus is:

(WinXP Software RAID == Bad Idea)

I just ordered a hardware RAID card from NewEgg. BUT...I really want to solve this problem, in case it starts up with my other machines. (I have more than one machine with the RAID-5 solution described originally at Toms Hardware [see Ref 1])

Here is my Q:

I just finished my 3rd machine with an install of the WinXP Software RAID-5. (4 new Seagate IDE 400 GB ST3400632A-RK drives) The RAID-5 array built successfully and life was good. I placed all my data on it and life was still good.

BUT, every time I shutdown/restart the machine the volume is not available in "My Computer" because it failed (As reported by the Local Disk Manager (LDM) in Computer management).

I choose to reactivate the volume, it "regenerates" for several hours, I run a chkdsk (as suggested by Windows) on the volume after it is done regenerating (it completes with no errors), and the volume works great until shutdown/restart. After a shutdown/restart the process starts all over again (with a "failed volume" in LDM).

This is the 3rd machine I built with WinXP Software RAID-5, and have never had this problem before - in fact one of my machines recovered very nicely when one of the HDs went bad...a lot of folks trash this RAID, but I have been running the oldest RAID 5 since FEB 2005 with no problems.

Any Ideas?

MB is ASUS P5K (BIOS v 0603)
All 4 Drives are on a SIIG SC-PE4B12-S4 (V1 Hardware - BIOS 1.20) IDE Controller with the ACard ATP865 Chipset

Ref 1:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/1 [...] index.html

Did you ever figure this out?

The same thing is happening to me, with a software RAID 1 (mirror) array created on two SATA disks under WindowsXP according to the reference you posted.

At first, it worked fine and came up healthy upon reboot.

But then, I installed a SATA CD drive (which I didn't have before), and since then the RAID comes up "failed" on re-boot every time, even if I now remove the CD drive, try re-assigning the drive letter, or anything else I can think of.

Luckily, it is always fine after re-sync, but access is slow during re-sync and it takes a long time!

Nope - I never did figure out the problem. My other two PC RAID-5 arrays are working fine, for my new machine I just took the hit and bought a hardware RAID card (IE, I let the RAID array rebuild once more, transferred the contents to another computer, installed the new hardware RAID card, built the new array with the drives, transferred all my data to the new array.)

Sorry - I guess I gave up on finding a solution.