ARECA broken Raid 5 how to save it

[grandswede]

My ARECA 1220 raid controller had 4 drives in a raid 5. It reported a problem occuring, where the only working drive was the one on channel 3, all others were down.

I stopped the machine and fixed the power to the other drives. But now, I have two raidsets instead of one. The drive on channel 3 is one raidset, and it is failed, for obvious reasons, but still ocnnected to the volume set.

The other three drives is reported as a raidset as well, with the same name, and not connected to a volume set. They are currnently both inactive and incomplete.Even if I disconnect channel 3 and restart, the three drives remain incomplete and without connection to a raid set.

How do I save the data and get the raid back up online?

1. I could try activating the three drives, hope for them becoming degraded, then create a volume set on them, but I fear then my data wil be lost.
2. I could disconnect the three drives, and add one at a time to the failed single disk still having the volume set associated with it. Maybe it will accept the disks and end up as degraded.
3. There are commands like migrate and rescue, maybe one of them can be used? But then how?

--- Help needed ---

 

[pug71]

When you get some time hop on over to 2cpu and join the forums and submit your problem in detail to the guys there. They are a great group of guys with a ton of RAID chat and alot of info on ARECA raid controllers there. I got to say this though, it was a recurring theme said when one is looking into RAID. No matter the Array setup you use you should be backing up at all times. Don here at HF taught me that.

I hope your problem will get worked out for you. In the end it will be a nice learnign experience. I just had something go down with my whole array. But i was fine because I had all that was important to me backed up.

 

[Pocatello]

ouch!

Let us know how it turns out.

 

[jbrukardt]

This is all too common with areca cards, heres what you need to do

go to "rescue RAID set" in the webgui

then follow this sequence (case is important)

RESCUE
reboot
SIGNAT

LeVeL2ReScUe
reboot
SIGNAT

That usually saves most arrays. IVe never seen RESCUE to work on its own, but LeVeL2ReScUe almost always works. Also, SIGNAT is important, dont forget it

Hope that helps (i originally learned all i know at 2cpu, as was mentioned above)