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Question about nvraid in raid1. Mirror problem.

[H]eckel

[H]eckel

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 8, 2001
Messages
1,905
The other day I was using my computer like normal and I had a weird message pop up saying that one of my drives in my array was disconnected but it went away almost instantly. It kind of scared me, but nothing else happened, so I just ignored it. A day or so later, my screen went black and my computer froze. When I booted back up, the raid controller in bios showed two mirrored arrays, each containing one drive, and both said they were "degraded".

Does anyone have any idea what would cause this? Even if I were to physically disconnect one of the drives, shouldn't the array stay in tact when I plug it back in or is it normal for it to show up as two arrays in that case?

I am in the process of rebuilding the array now, but I just want to know if there is anything I can do to prevent this from happening in the future.

Also, if the drives just split like that, is there a way of joining them back together without having to delete one of the arrays and rebuilding that drive in to the other? When they were split, they showed up as two identical seperate drives in windows so I know the data was in tact and identical on both drives.

I set up the array for piece of mind, but I am new to this and would hate to lose all of my "safe" data, just because I am not very experienced with raid issues.

Thanks in advance for the help.
 
Need more info, such as drive types, makes and models running in the array to really diagnose the problem.
 
Two identical SATA 320GB WD Caviars running on an onboard nvraid controller.
 
SE or Raid Edition?

If they are not raid edition drives, this is your problem. There's a time out length for read problems for raid controllers. WHen you go past this time out length it assumes the drive has died and drops it from the array. Certain western digital drives have an overly long timeout period, well beyond what most raid arrays timeout on. The raid edition drives have a much lower timeout period. So they don't have the same problem.
 
Hmm, never heard of raid edition. I might have to look in to that.



On a side note, I have been trying to rebuild this array, but it has frozen twice at 83%. The first time I rebooted and now, the second time, I let it go all night and the nvraid utility is no longer responding.

Think it could just be a bad drive? What should I use to test raid drives?
 
You'll have to test them individually with the tool from WD (you can find a copy on the UBCD). It's a read-only test, so it won't destroy the data on the drives.

 
Thanks for the info. I think that might be just what I was looking for.
 
Are you talking about the data lifeguard tools and/or data lifeguard diagnostics? That is what I found on their website.
 
How do I get them out of the array without destroying the data? The WD tools do not detect the drives because they are being controlled the the raid controller.
 
Pull them out and put them on another controller; it won't destroy the data, and the test is read-only.

The DLG diagnostics are (IIRC) what I was talking about. The UBCD is a good, easy way to get them.

 
Ahh, UBCD. Sorry, had to look it up. That sounds like a plan. I do have another SATA raid controller on the board. I'll have to plug the drives in there and check them out. Thanks again.
 
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