View Full Version : My RAID appears screwed
So I booted this morning and got some breakfast, came back and found my computer saying one of my two raid1 drives was screwed. Odd given I put them in about 3-4 months ago.
Rebooted and checked the status and it said degraded, came back into windows which took about 5 minutes of waiting (gave up the first time but just waited the 2nd) - after ages to boot down too and now I have two 320gb drives which aren't raided any more.
Is there any way I can get the raid back without a format? And test the drives to see if one is really dieing already.
[Edit] I actually have two new HDs, both of them are showing as partitioned.
snap, had the same thing. If you can get into Windows it will normally say which hdd is buggered. One of mine lasted about 3 months <- not happy. The other option is to pull one of the drives. If it boots, you know you have pulled the buggered one, if not try the other one.
To rebuild you should just be able to drop a new drive of the same size in and it will automatically be rebuilt. Just turn the machine on and if you are using the intel raid it'll just start. Leave the machine on for a while without using it.
I guess these things must come in threes then as I have just found a degraded drive in my RAID 1 array as well. Going to be fun finding out which drive that is as I have a choice of four (two arrays on the same controller). I suspect I'll probably end up degrading the second array before I'm done.
Means I'm going to have to buy another cold spare when I can least afford it too. :/
Chuckles
21-07-2008, 12:40
I don't know consumer stuff so well but normally you can tell the controller the flash the light on the drive which is dodgy if you can't identify it another way. When you replace it, the array should just rebuild automatically.
Hmm, is it definitely dead? It seems odd I can access both drives just as seperate ones through Windows.
Don't these things come with a warranty? Could do without spending another £40 myself :(
Most likely it has some unrecoverable bad sectors. RAID arrays tend to not like those because they cause the two drives to get out of sync.
Anyway, fortunately last time I rebuilt my system I 'tagged' both ends of each drive cable, so as long as I tagged both ends the same, I think I know which one is the dud in my system. We'll soon find out when I power it back on to check. :)
Windows doesn't say either is dead. I can boot from both though it takes about 1.5 minutes to get to the login screen, but get a 1 drive red flashing degraded error for both.
So no idea which one is dead, might have to try a re-build and then if that fails get a new drive and try building it with each of mine in turn?! Unfortunately my external is also making quiet clonking noises worrying me now too. Time to break out some DVDs I guess.
Fetch out the tools to read S.M.A.R.T sensors (e.g. Speedfan). Not a foolproof method for sure (disks can fail even if S.M.A.R.T says they're good), but better than nothing.
Taken the failed disk out of my own system and I'm currently testing the replacement (which seems, oddly, to be an older batch even though I ordered it at the same time as the one it's replacing). Meanwhile, the 'failed' disk is powered up and being tested on another system. Nothing to report so far.
In both your and my case the drive may simply have encountered a failing sector and recovered (RAID arrays like mine may fail the disk simply because it took too long to read the data). The disk itself still works afterwards because all modern drives have a few hundred redundant sectors for such cases.
Speedfan can't actually see either drive and doesn't do more than see the external, when I select it no long list appears as I'd expect. Going to try a re-build in windows now.
Mine seems fine again (so-far...) after letting windows rebuild it for a couple of hours.
Time will tell, good luck with your's too Mark
Well, assuming this 'new' (sat in a box for a few years) disk is good, then it'll be fine. The problem is all five (4+1) disks in the array were bought around the same time (within a month), so if one is going south... :(
Damnit mines gone again :-(
The old disk in mine checked out fine so I've archived it for now as a backup since all the data on it is intact. I suspect it just fell off the array for reasons unknown (not unheard of). New disk is also fine so it's been mirrored and the array has been fine so far.
Well mine is pretty screwed, it's taken me 2 hours just to get back online after I attempted to re-build, it went into a crazed loop and I rebooted. I've installed Windows 3 times, attempted to stick it onto the passport drive when my raid appeared too corrupted but no luck.
Currently I've got one non-raided original sata drive working, the other isn't plugged in but that has a new windows partition, and the passport drive stops anything booting despite the fact that I couldn't actually get windows to finish installing on it.
And on top of this one of my £10 fans appears bust, nasty and clicking and chipset is up to 50C with that and the heat despite it being almost midnight and having cooled down somewhat.
Here goes my weekend :-(
There is something going around I swear. I've just had my servers raid decide to nerf itself. First the bios lost the raid setup meaning that windows booted without the raid controller, then rebooted with the raid which well and truely buggered it. Trying to repair but I think its a windows reinstall :angry:
I'd suggest that hardware RAID is the only way, but I've even known those to nerf themselves.
Thankfully my RAID controller has so far survived a hard disk write-off and several rebuilds. The worst I've had happen was a very annoying driver breakage in the 2.6.19-2.6.20 Linux kernels (right when I needed drivers from those kernels). I can live with a drive falling off the array once or twice if that's the worst I get. I'd best go hug the nearest tree to make sure. :)
Argh! Not a lot got done over the weekend what with the heat and all but it did seem to be working off of one drive. That drive now clunks and freezes but only when I use firefox, rest of the time it's fine with ie7 and stuff.
Except my email inbox appears to have lost a few thousand messages. But at least I can backup most stuff.
Does anyone know where ff3 stores bookmarks? Loads of webpages seem to have details on exporting them but I can't actually get into firefox enough to use it or do that.
Well it's confirmed, I just did scans of the drives with a samsung scanning thingy and one is fine the other (secondary so guess that's the second raid port on the mobo) gives some media type error and a huge number of ecc errors whatever they are while on random scan.
The quick surface scan took about 7 attempts to complete. Guess it's time to try for an RMA :-(
ECC = Error Correction Code
It's an algorithm designed to recover single-bit errors in data storage (RAM, hard disk, whatever). Hard disks do tend to produce some of those by the very nature of the media but they should be recovered internally. If you're getting them reported in diagnostics it means something serious is going on. Back up and RMA ASAP. :(
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