Software RAID under XP failed - Need Help

[Saa|3]

Hi, I got a bit of a problem I hope you guys can help me with. I am running a RAID 5 server with 7 x 400 GB drives under windows XP's software RAID (using the hack/workaround to enable RAID 5). It has been running fine for years, and now all of a sudden a power outage happened and caused my array to fail. This seems to me like a complete failure rather than a redundancy failure where just one disk fails. (See a picture of my "Disk Management" screenshot here: http://pics.mazurw.com/failedRaid/failed%20completely.JPG) To compare, when I had just one disk fail it specifically told me "Failed Redundancy", see screenshot here (from years ago): http://pics.mazurw.com/failedRaid/failed%20redundancy.JPG

So my question is has anyone experienced something similar? Any idea what the fault could be? I have done a lot of diagnostics to see what the problem is and cannot find any faults. I put my OS image (created before the power outage while everything was working) onto a new drive and booted from that, and I got the same problem, so it's nothing wrong on the OS drive. I connected a new drive to each port on the motherboard to see if the MoBo has any failures, and it all works. Also, the SMART monitoring of the HD's shows that they are all okay. About the one thing I have not done is check each RAID disk whether it reads/writes, as I don't want to overwrite the data on them.

The only option I have is to Re-Activate the RAID volume, but when I go to do that I get this message: (picture of it here: http://pics.mazurw.com/failedRaid/reactivate%20volume.JPG)

"WARNING: This operation will make the volume available for use but the data on it may be corrupted or stale. If you have another disk that contains part of this volume, reconnect it to this machine and reactivate the volume from that disk. If you choose to continue with this reactivate, it is recommended that chkdsk be run on this volume before using it. If chkdsk fails or finds an excessive number of errors, you may need to reformat the volume and restore its contents from backup. Do you want to continue?"

I chose NO so far and won't say yes unless all other avenues have been explored, and then I also have backup images of each of those drives.

So, any ideas on what else I could try? Anyone with any similar experience?

Thanks!

[anderslu]

Hello Saa|3,

Have you had any luck recovering your RAID volume?
I just ran into the same situation, and after checking that there were no cables loose etc I chose to reactivate volume. So far everything seems intact, I'm making a backup right now in case something happens when I run chkdsk.


//Anders

[epimetheus]

While I don't have a solution for you, I have to ask: Why don't you have a UPS on a system with a rather large RAID volume? I won't run RAID in any situation without battery backup, especially software RAID.

[Saa|3]

I have not yet tried to re-activate the volume, though if you say you had good luck with it that is certainly encouraging. I will have to deal with this sooner rather than later after all... The lack of responses here was making me start to look into RAID recovery companies! And I would need to save a while to have money to afford that... I'll have to buy a few HD's to make backup images of existing ones before I re-activate, then I'll do that and share my results.

As for the UPS, I never thought I would need it. If power fails it shuts down my PC, I reboot, no damage done, right? I have a surge protector. I guess with software RAID, or any RAID for that matter, I can see it being a little more sensitive to power failures with the parity calculationg going on all the time.

Anybody else out there use UPS on their RAID systems? Interesting to get some feedback on that.

Thanks for all the help so far!

[brandinb]

Just tell it to rebuild the volume. Do you have a backup of the data like you should? This is a typical redundancy failure caused by the power outage (disk subsystem shutdown unexpectedly). This typically happens with software raid controllers because the raid is run at the driver level and so is the raid cache so unexpected shutdown will corrupt the volume. The rebuild will verify the volume and correct the issue unless something unexpected happens.

If you did a block for block image of all disks you could install all the imaged disks and restore the volume while not using the original disks if you have super critical data you cannot loose.

Personally i would just rebuild it :P

good luck

[epimetheus]

I run Matrix RAID on a couple of my systems with intel ICH*R chipsets. I enabled write-behind caching, therefore I will not run those systems without a UPS. If there's a power outage and there's still data in the cache to be written, the array is toast.

[leon2046]

try this tool: http://www.getwayrecovery.com (http://www.getwayrecovery.com/raid-recovery-software.html) supports both hardware and software raid rebuilding.