Help! Areca SATA RAID is hosed.

[daeedorian]

Welp. Now I've done it.

I have an old Areca ARC-1220 SATA RAID card. I built the RAID tower about 7 years ago, and it contains tons of personal files, not all of which are properly backed up. (I know...)

It has 8 channels, and they're all in use to create one 7TB RAID5 volume. The disks are a mix of 1TB WD Caviar Blacks and some Samsungs.

The issue started when the volume began streaming read errors from Ch1, and I had to unmount it in Windows because it slowed to a crawl trying to access the volume. I assume bad blocks/sectors.

No problem, just need to replace that drive.

Well, here's where I screwed up. I accidentally pulled the wrong HDD, (Ch7) and when I realized this and reconnected it, the RAID set started rebuilding onto Ch7.

The problem is that now the rebuild fails because of the read errors from Ch1, the *actually* dead HDD.

I've read about a tactic involving deleting the RAID Set and recreating it without initialization. Could this potentially work?

Thanks so much.

 

[daeedorian]

The "LeVeL2ReScUe" function fixed it instantly! The RaidSet is still degraded, but it's no longer trying to rebuild a good drive!

I cannot believe it.

What an incredible relief.