Raid 5 server failed what should I do...

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FanMasta

n00b
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Nov 3, 2006
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Please help.
I am a newb and I have built home data server with Rocketraid 2322 and 8x500gb drives in raid 5 array about 1 year ago. yesterday I came back from work and heard beep noise from my server which looked like warning so I checked and one drive from array was degraded but since it was in raid 5 I could just hot swap and be fine. I did that but it won't let me rebuild for some reason I was going in internet to find out how to make it work and in no time other drives start failing simultaneously and that means really bad for raid 5. But when I restart its just fine except the first degraded drive. So I thought it was ok to leave them like that and long story short 2 more drives failed I think. the controller cant even recognize these drives. Im kind of exhausted please what should I do? It had all the data that cant be replaced which are photo's and video's also my work datas. Is there anyway to recover datas?
 
How many drives did you have failing totally?
What type of drives are they?
Do you have backups?

Also, yes, there are recovery services availible, but for arrays like this, expect the price to be in the thousands for recovery.
 
Make sure all of your wires are connected tightly, make sure your PSU voltages are good, and try booting it without the one drive that failed originally.
 
Itwas very strange because drive failed and worked back and forth but for now there are 1 drive that degraded and 2 drive that are not recognized. This i partly the reason why I think the proplem might be in the controller. The type of drive are just regular 500gb sata WD and Hitachi drives. This was just for home data storage so I didn't used enterprise server graded drives. I didn't do backup. As a newb I thoght my server with raid 5 array is the safest storage ever because I can just swap drive when it fails. So from things I said could it possibly be the controller? If it is can't I just buy another controller and recover?
 
Well, RAID5 only protects against a single drive failure, if you have another drive failing on you during array reconstruction, well, that's going to have some data loss. :(

It's not entirely impossible for a second drive to fail after a first one, that's why they invented RAID6 and RAID 0+1/10 for these situations. Hopefully you kept backups, because if double drive failure were the case, then your data is in danger. :eek:
 
Did the drive fail or was the alarm going off for the drive. It may have just been corrupted and was going to rebuild all by itself. I would just put the old drive back in and see if it would rebuild itself then. But next time do a 50 raid much safer. It will also allow for 2 drive failures which is much safer. But you must state 2 drives during build. Also I use hot swap for all 10 drives.

This happened to me last week and it took about 10 minutes for a rebuild. I use 10 hd's
But not that large mine are smaller so rebuild and access times are faster.

Have fun

I guess I have a weird raid card adaptec but I have 2 hotswaps for drive failures which are automaticly put into service with 1 or a 2 disk failure so that there is no down time.
 
crewzen said:
Did the drive fail or was the alarm going off for the drive. It may have just been corrupted and was going to rebuild all by itself. I would just put the old drive back in and see if it would rebuild itself then. But next time do a 50 raid much safer. It will also allow for 2 drive failures which is much safer. But you must state 2 drives during build. Also I use hot swap for all 10 drives.

This happened to me last week and it took about 10 minutes for a rebuild. I use 10 hd's
But not that large mine are smaller so rebuild and access times are faster.

Have fun
Click to expand...

Raid 50 only allows for a single drive failure within its array. After the first drive fail, it's a 50/50 shot for the second drive to fail on that same array. It only allows for two drives to fail if a drive fails within each array.
 
FanMasta said:
Itwas very strange because drive failed and worked back and forth but for now there are 1 drive that degraded and 2 drive that are not recognized. This i partly the reason why I think the proplem might be in the controller. The type of drive are just regular 500gb sata WD and Hitachi drives. This was just for home data storage so I didn't used enterprise server graded drives. I didn't do backup. As a newb I thoght my server with raid 5 array is the safest storage ever because I can just swap drive when it fails. So from things I said could it possibly be the controller? If it is can't I just buy another controller and recover?
Click to expand...

Stupid question to ask, but I'm going to ask it anyways. Did you perhaps not pull a working drive thinking it may have been the dead drive?

How did you detirmine which was the dead drive that you pulled? It's not uncommon for a signaling wire to be miss-wired or a dead drive to be wrongly identified.
 
crewzen said:
next time do a 50 raid much safer. It will also allow for 2 drive failures which is much safer
Click to expand...
technically true but raid 50 requires a minimum of 6 disks. raid 6 and 10 require minimum 4. raid 1 minimum 2. for data security I rec. a raid 1 over two disks with a backup to a thrid disk of equal size. then you have live security and also a backup. it takes 3 disks but for peace of mind it's nice.
 
Ah the harsh reality that RAID is not Backup, nor is Backup RAID.

RAID is to allow you to keep your system running or get it running faster in the event of a hard drive failure. (notice I said nothing about Data in that)

Backup is to secure your Data. (for any event that might cause Data loss)

Now, what to do in your case is to shut everything down, check all the cabling (both SATA and power) and test the PowerSupply.

In the future, use all the same drives, and don't use WD desktop drives without enabling TLER on them. (this is a "hack" because desktop WD drives don't behave well with RAID cards)
 
When I heard the beep and I loked up it said degraded. dandragonrage I emptied the slot of that degrded drive and now the 2 unrecognized drives are recognized. Thank god. So now in bios it say that there are 5 intialized and 2 drive that were unrecognized is now in configured statues. and the array is now in disable statues. So what do I do now? Put new drive in?
 
Ockie, When I heard the warning I went in to bios and saw number 7 drive in statues degradedso I pulled it out and that number 7 slot turned missing.
 
FanMasta said:
When I heard the beep and I loked up it said degraded. dandragonrage I emptied the slot of that degrded drive and now the 2 unrecognized drives are recognized. Thank god. So now in bios it say that there are 5 intialized and 2 drive that were unrecognized is now in configured statues. and the array is now in disable statues. So what do I do now? Put new drive in?
Click to expand...

Try sticking a new drive in and let it fully rebuild.

If this works, then backup all your data... that should be your highest priority.
 
I know with many of the SCSI RAID cards I have used there is an option to "force online" don't ever do this with a dead drive as you will get data corruption, but if the drive just dropped incorrectly from the array this will put it back in.
 
ok here are some photos to show what is happening. I put a 500gb drive and initialized it so now on my bios it say there are 2 configured drives and 6 initialized drives. So what do I do now looks like there is still a disabled raid 5 array but I don't know what to do now with 6 initialized drives do I just create raid with these 6 drives? I mean I have to reconstruct the array but don't know how to. In the manual it said to go in to the windows and open the GUI management program and click add on drive that is broken but when I go to the GUI program it shows only 2 drives and in other 6 it does not show any thing.

DCAM0371.jpg


DCAM0369.jpg


DCAM0367.jpg
 
That does not look good. DO NOT CREATE any array, you will destroy your data.

Sadly, what I am going to suggest for you is that you scrap and start over. It looks as if somehow two of your drives got bumped out of the array, I'm not sure how you can add them back in with out re processing the entire array (resulting in the loss of data)

What is weird that if one of your drives was dead, you shouldn't be able to see it on the controller screen (in theory)
 
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