Silicon Image 3114R Raid controller delete orphan

I have the P5AD2 Premium Mother Board / Windows XP.
I have 2 Maxtor drives connected to the Intel ICH6R chip in a Raid 1
mirroring configuration. I use this device as my boot device. I've
had on several occasions 1 of the 2 drives go bad and have successfully
booted on the primary drive. I have also successfully replaced the bad
drive and re-mirrored the 2 drives connected to the Intel chip.
On the Silicon Image 3114R chip I also have 2 Maxtor drives set up as
Raid 1 mirroring. I use this device to store my applications on.
The problem I know have is that one of the drives on the Silicon chip
has gone bad. When I boot, during the post I press <Ctrl+S>. One
drive is listed as "current" and the presumed bad drive is listed
as "Invalid Raid device". I power off the computer, remove the bad
drive, boot, and during post I see the good drive still listed as
"Current". I continue to boot the O/S. Yet, the O/S cannot see
this drive. I would like to be able to access the data on in this
degraded raid set. If I run the Silicon Raid management software this
device is listed as "orphan". I see there is an option to delete
orphans, but I don't understand this option correctly.
Does the delete orphan option fix bad records on the disk and thus
allow access to the drive or does it completely destroy all data on the
disk?
In the meantime I have ordered a spare and plan on replacing the drive
and using the Bios utility to rebuild the Raid1 set, hopefully.
Thanks in advance.

 

With a mirror drive (on board raid) if a hd goes bad, and corruption occurs
it will be mirrored on the other drive
You might try the HD manu checking utility on the remaining drive and see if
it finds / can correct any errors.

I assume when you say o/s cannot see drive that Disk Management cannot see
the drive

If you 'pull' one drive of the mirrored set the other drive should still be
accessible