mwmccaw
asked on
RAID 5 array broken in half
My media server, a WinXP Pro box with a rocket raid 454 card, just split its RAID5 array in half.
On bootup, the card bios announces that drives 3 and 4 have failed. Bypassing the array, and booting into the OS, I run the RAID software. It shows TWO identically named (RAID_5_0) RAID5 arrays, each containing two live disks. Both are, of course, broken.
Is there any way to recombine these into the one original array and save the data? The only thing I can think of is to delete one of the arrays and then add the two freed disks to the original array, but belive that if I do that, the system will simply treat the "new" disks as blank, and the array will still be toast.
This is critical!
Thanks in advance,
Mike
On bootup, the card bios announces that drives 3 and 4 have failed. Bypassing the array, and booting into the OS, I run the RAID software. It shows TWO identically named (RAID_5_0) RAID5 arrays, each containing two live disks. Both are, of course, broken.
Is there any way to recombine these into the one original array and save the data? The only thing I can think of is to delete one of the arrays and then add the two freed disks to the original array, but belive that if I do that, the system will simply treat the "new" disks as blank, and the array will still be toast.
This is critical!
Thanks in advance,
Mike
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Mike,
I had a very similar problem to this recently. An engineer "accidently" plugged the new hard drives to replace a faulty ones in after shutting down the server, instead of Hot Swapping the drives. This causes the RAID card to see two seperate arrays. This was a two drive failure.
Our resolution was to recreate a new array, and complete a system restore from backup.
Bit of bad luck three drives going at the same time. In my experience this is unrepairable.
I had a very similar problem to this recently. An engineer "accidently" plugged the new hard drives to replace a faulty ones in after shutting down the server, instead of Hot Swapping the drives. This causes the RAID card to see two seperate arrays. This was a two drive failure.
Our resolution was to recreate a new array, and complete a system restore from backup.
Bit of bad luck three drives going at the same time. In my experience this is unrepairable.
ASKER
Problem solved.
This was a hiccup of the controller card or its software. Note that the problem statement said that the physical disks were OK, just that they were being incorrectly recognized
I got a small DOS utility from HPT that allowed me to recreate the array (had to be very careful to enter all disks in the correct order) and write that to the flash on the card, and everything came back just fine.
This was a hiccup of the controller card or its software. Note that the problem statement said that the physical disks were OK, just that they were being incorrectly recognized
I got a small DOS utility from HPT that allowed me to recreate the array (had to be very careful to enter all disks in the correct order) and write that to the flash on the card, and everything came back just fine.
ASKER