Somebody up there doesn't like me.

[NecessaryEvil]

my RAID 5 array just went out. (rocketRAID 404; 8x 80gb)

it's showing 2 out of the 8 drives.

Anyone have any suggestions? I need it working at the very least, long enough to get the rest of my files off there (I was transferring the contents over to an external drive....180gb worth of avi, mpg, mp3, isos, etc.

I'd be very unhappy if I lost it....but since I was just fired today...somehow I don't seen all that concerned. Certainly not as much as I should be.


Can anyone provide some insight as to how to get things working again? It just stopped working for no reason....1 minute I was transferring, the next minute, it said network source no longer available. I reset the computer since it wasn't connecting...and when I rebooted, they all vanished!

[Ugly_Jim]

Christ, you got fired and lost your gigantic raid5 array in one day? This is one of the worst days I've ever heard of. I hope you recover your data :(

[NecessaryEvil]

any ideas? Drive 0 & 1 show up when on channel 1 (but nothing else). I've changed out the IDE cables, and nothing.


Any ideas? 10am I say fuck it all and destroy the array, and lose 8000 mp3s, 200 video files, and 24 iso files. My entire music collection since I was 13, every Simpsons, Futurama, Beavis & Butthead, and Family Guy episode.

Gone.

[compslckr]

its 10:06, i guess it is all gone :(

sorry to hear about that man, that is alot of great files.

[NecessaryEvil]

nah...I'll hold off for another 3 hours...

[SJConsultant]

How about moving the drives around to see if it's a controller problem?, e.g. remove the known good drives and put two of the other drives that are not showing up on the cables the good drives were hooked up to.

Sounds more like the controller went bad then the drives considering your only seeing two out of 8 total.

[NecessaryEvil]

if I pull the 2 drives, the other 6 show up.

other drives show up on the other channels...but drives 0 & 1 don't show up anywhere but channel 1.

[Ice Czar]

man your having a bad couple of days here
be careful with the channel switching, thats how I lost my array
though the manual said different, the knowledge base said I was screwed
when I migrated the array supposedly the array info was contained on each drive
(written to the same area that dynamic drive overlays get installed) and it was supposed to rerecognize and adapt, only it didnt (A BIOS upgrade supposedly fixed that)
you have eight channels and I had only 6, but thats still 720 different possible combinations

at this point I dont have any advice and would defer to Snugglebear or UICompE02
so wait for them to show up, and research the knowledgebase for proceedures ;)

dont destroy the array, youd regret it

[GlobalFear]

So then why not copy all the info off 0 and one then pull them and get the rest off of the other ones? I don't know much about raid. Just trieing to help.

[SJConsultant]

So then why not copy all the info off 0 and one then pull them and get the rest off of the other ones? I don't know much about raid. Just trieing to help.

You cannot directly copy information from a RAID 5 array, at the very least you'd need to "ghost" the hard drives, but even then that is no guarentee it will work.

NecessaryEvil,

If you've got the patience to wait, and like Ice Czar said, maybe Snugglebear will be around to offer some help.

[Ice Czar]

with Symantec Ghost (Enterprise) you can do a complete sector by sector clone
requires using the swuitches, but its a damn powerful program
however GlobalFear youd still need to rebuild the array to access the data
as its striped accross the drives along with parity data that would allow you to rebuild any drive that failed, but if you loose 2 drives your screwed, which is why NecessaryEvil is in such a tight spot

I find it unlikely both failed at the same time from wear, and they are recognized individually
but there could be other issues, the data is likely all there, its just getting to it

NecessaryEvil, PM Snugglebear and UICompE02 a link to this thread ;)

[NecessaryEvil]

PMs were sent.

I have this weekend to fix it. Monday I have to I scrap it and all the data that's on it.

[GlobalFear]

Oh don't really understand raid. Non the less sorry about your job. And for viewing the [H] Forums. :(

[Ice Czar]

Oh don't really understand raid. Non the less sorry about your job. And for viewing the [H] Forums. :(

easily remedied ;)
Read This (http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index.html) and youll know more than 99.9% of the world's population :p

no reason to be put off, education is what the forums are about
not just helping "fix" someones problem
you suggestion is, in the right context, quite valuable
if you suspect a HDD to be damaged, often youd break it from the array and then clone it to a new HDD, hoping that any data error arent so great as to keep the array from reading the stripe and parity information, but youd then know its not the HDD itself that is at fault
and considering there are in this array 8 HDDs, the odds go up quite alot, but in this case
they do seem to be recognized when he changes the number connected, and that points to a different problem

dont be shy about contributing, a few members can be a little [H]ard
but they where all computer n00bs once and most of them still are in at least one of the forums here, I sound like an idiot in webmastering and programming :p

[GlobalFear]

Thanks, I learned a lot from that.

[UICompE02]

Hmm, well this is an interesting situation you have here.

I'm not personally familiar with RocketRAID products, so what I say may or may not have any bearing on how those work -- but if you've tried everything else and are desperate, this may work.

Okay, first a BIG warning, I've done this procedure on LSI Logic U320 MegaRAID products several times without an issue - but depending on how your particular controller behaves and what actually caused the problem, this may not work or may completely wipe out any chance of getting your data back...

Here's what I have done before with success: Delete the array from the controller setup. Create a new array exactly like your old one, but do not initialize it! That last part is the most important, but may be exactly the reason why this won't work on your controller. Will it let you create a RAID array without initializing it? This almost always let me get my data back in the case where there was no actual physical failure (i.e. firmware screwed up or a cable was plugged in just right to give a ton or CRC errors so the drive was failed, etc.)

I see you also mention it won't recognize all the drives together, is there some way to reset/clear the configuration (with all the drives disconnected) or reflash the firmware, sometimes starting with a clean slate will clear up that type of problem.

[Snugglebear]

I can't see all those drives failing at once, either. Whether some omnipotent being was trying to smite you and the lightning bolt grounded out on the utility pole near your house or the guy at the local nuclear plant dozed off after too many donuts and they raised the line flow to avoid a meltdown, it's just too bizarre for 6/8 drives to get hit and nothing else. Of course I also have a secret weapon called groups.google.

A few months back I checked into this card on request from a friend thinking of purchasing one. There were a disturbingly large number of newsgroup and mailing list posts about similar problems with that highpoint - controllers marking good drives as failed or unavailable. On this and its reliance on drivers for RAID functionality, I advised him against that card. I don't recall what the exact cause or solutions were, but they are out there.

The procedure UIComp outlined is the one I've used once in the past with an old Adaptec with some success (a real shit->fan situation several years ago; one drive really failed, two others marked as such, recovered the array and the two fake fails, replaced failed drive, another drive really fails on rebuild, data->heaven). It's worth a shot.

[NecessaryEvil]

Thanks guys, I'll try that out.



I'll mark this as a lesson to never buy software RAID controllers in the future.

(Previously, I had an LSI MegaRAID i4, and it worked great. But, a friend of a friend was upgrading his RAID array to SATA...so I jumped on this.)

[Snugglebear]

Thanks guys, I'll try that out.



I'll mark this as a lesson to never buy software RAID controllers in the future.

(Previously, I had an LSI MegaRAID i4, and it worked great. But, a friend of a friend was upgrading his RAID array to SATA...so I jumped on this.)

It happens to hardware ones as well, even ones that are expensive, full-featured, and carry brand names. Just do your research first, that's all anyone can do.

[NecessaryEvil]

I lost it all



oh well

[UICompE02]

I lost it all



oh well

Well, we tried...

*heads off to do a backup...

[Ice Czar]

Damn, sorry man I know how that feels
but one one thing on top of the other.....