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View Full Version : two disks fail on raid 0 - start from scratch?

asuh
10-09-2008, 12:50 PM
Here's my specs:

Dell PowerEdge 1600sc
Dual 2.4GB Xeon
4GB RAM
3x 36GB Seagate ST336607LW
LSI Logic 1020/1030 (adaptec??)
73GB SCSI Raid 5

Assuming both did not fail at the same time, I'm now stuck trying to get this server back. Upon boot, it says:

1 Logical Drive found
1 Logical Drive failed
1 Logical Drive handled by BIOS

I'm not sure what my options are. Would buying two new hard disks and trying to rebuild the RAID 5 be the best option? I don't think the SCSI adapter is at fault if it's reading at least one drive, but I'm not sure either.

Desperately needing help!!
Ockie
10-09-2008, 01:16 PM
Wait, you ran Raid 0 on a production server? Please tell me it's just a personal system.

As for your rebuild issue, you can't, it's Raid 0, if one disk fail you lose everything. Hope you have adequate backups!
asuh
10-09-2008, 01:22 PM
Oops, I changed it to 5. I verified this and it's indeed running or used to run a RAID 5 before it failed.
Ockie
10-09-2008, 01:24 PM
I would try running with one hard drive and seeing if you can get the failed drive rebuilt. If you lost two drives, then you lost everything in the process.

Can you still access the system or run the system? If not, that would be a pretty good indication that the entire thing failed, which means data loss. Can you pull logs on the failures?
asuh
10-09-2008, 01:30 PM
When I arrived this morning, the server was in the POST section of starting up. It gave me the following:

1 Logical Drive Found
1 Logical Drive Failed
1 Logical Drive handled by BIOS

Then it said no boot disk could be found. I would take a wild guess that even if two drives failed, on a RAID 5, it's still possible (maybe not probable) that you can run the computer without the other drives.

I cannot access anything as is. The only logs of the failure would be inside the OS, with a log of when it failed. But no other information would be available.
asuh
10-09-2008, 07:20 PM
After talking to a Dell support person, we figured out that at least one and possibly two hard drives are not working as well as they should be. One of them is pretty much gone completely.

We forced one of the drives back into the RAID which allowed me to get back into the OS. Since then I have been backing up and preparing to buy three new drives so that we can reinstall the OS from scratch.

Problem kinda solved.
Ockie
10-09-2008, 07:59 PM
After talking to a Dell support person, we figured out that at least one and possibly two hard drives are not working as well as they should be. One of them is pretty much gone completely.

We forced one of the drives back into the RAID which allowed me to get back into the OS. Since then I have been backing up and preparing to buy three new drives so that we can reinstall the OS from scratch.

Problem kinda solved.

Glad you didn't completley lose two drives, sounds like you are in a degraded state. Perhaps might be a good recomendation from me to get larger drives, but run RAID 1 on the system, so you still have the same capacity, but a little more redundancy.