Author Topic: Fubar'd RAID0 (Read 2291 times)

sully! · « **on:** March 21, 2006, 08:07:47 PM »

Sooooo.....

I came home tonight and saw a BSOD on my monitor. Ok, Windows crashed. It happens, I'll restart.

While the RAID controller was initializing, it took a really long time to detect anything, and then finally "Warning! Problem detected with array. Press Ctrl-F to enter Fast Build utility or Esc to continue booting."

From the looks of it, drive 1 in the array took a dump on me (I still have further testing to do to 100% verify this). I know I am pretty much screwed since this was a striped array.

Ironically, I've recently been contemplating getting another drive or two and turning this into a RAID 5, just in case something like this happened.

Anyways....if anyone's been through this before and has any mystical, voodoo and/or jedi tricks they used to salvage anything from the failed array, please let me know. In the meantime, I'll be trying to develop my own...mystical, voodoo, jedi tricks.

Wish me luck :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:

Pride · « **Reply #1 on:** March 21, 2006, 08:10:17 PM »

Download Hiren's Boot Disk... and run the hard drive recovery tools.

You may just have a corrupt or invalid MBR.

Billabond1 · « **Reply #2 on:** March 21, 2006, 09:05:53 PM »

curse of the lan party!!!

cuzzNkev · « **Reply #3 on:** March 22, 2006, 07:15:26 AM »

At least it didn't bring the network down and then crash completely you on while you were at the LAN party.

The Shoctor · « **Reply #4 on:** March 22, 2006, 07:17:02 AM »

A MBR wouldn't cause the array controller to have an issue finding the drives.... Unless the raid config data is damaged... And then again it's almost as good as having a dead drive.

sully! · « **Reply #5 on:** March 23, 2006, 10:12:06 PM »

Whoohoo!!!

Success! No loss of data!!!

Google is my friend....and Rick too:

Quote from: "http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-14076-RAID-0-failure.html"

Rick
07-08-2004, 10:03 PM
Do you know why your controller is reporting a bad container / array?

Are one of the drives faulty? Perhaps one became unplugged or a cable is loose?

First, determine why the container / array is bad

DO NOT RUN ANY SORT OF FILE SYSTEM CHECKER ON A SINGLE DRIVE FROM AN ARRAY. This includes scandisk, chkdsk etc... Use only manufacturer's disk diagnostics or known file system independant utilities. I've never done it before, but I'm assuming it will probably wipe out your data quicker than you can cancel.

Disconnect the drives from your controller and run drive diagnostics independantly on each drive using the IDE channel (if possible). If you are using SATA or SCSI, run the drives in non-RAID mode. For utilities, please check out this thread: http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7602

If one drive fails the test...
Try running a program like HDD Regnerator (also see above thread)

If one drive is not detected or is making funny noises...
This is a very serious problem which may be the result of bad electronics or mechanics. Sometimes this is repairable by the end user, but not often.

If both drives pass the diagnostics
Reconnect your array and double check your cables. There may have been a loose cable somewhere in the mix. You may also have an intermittent drive which the diagnostic utilities may not be able to detect reliably.

Recreate your array
Once you determine your drives are good, or repair your drive(s) individually, you can move on to the next step. The data on both drives independantly is nearly useless, but you may be able to ressurect your RAID 0 deleting and recreating the array. Please be sure that your controller does not initialize/format the array by default. All RAID controllers I've worked with will prompt you first before initalizing the array. Initialization is a nice way of saying "quick format".

Basically, each drive has half of your data. If things get out of sync, your data is still there, but the controller can't sort it out.

You can safely delete an array (how your data looks to the controller) without deleting the data on the drives (Your data on the physical drives). Once you create a new array using the drives and the same parameters as the original array, the controller should use your existing data as the array. Everythign should be back to normal now.

Please be very careful! I care about your data, but I am not going to take responsibility for any misinformation or misintpretation regarding this post. Just trying to help you out.

AND LASTLY...

If your data is remotely important to you, you should always back it up. While it is unfortunate, I hope you have learned a lesson from this.

I had already done the first part of his suggestion (running the manufacturer's diagnostics, and HDD Regenerator....22 hours for 300GB...wow), but no errors found. I wouldn't have thought about deleting the array definition and then re-defining it. But it worked without a problem. Chkdsk ran when I booted up and it found a few bad files, but repaired them all.

Lesson learned: I think I'll be converting this to a RAID1 until I can get more drives for a RAID5.

cuzzNkev · « **Reply #6 on:** March 24, 2006, 07:35:31 AM »

Woot. Its good you didn't lose anything.

zx2slow · « **Reply #7 on:** March 25, 2006, 09:04:04 AM »

If you have you PC overclocked, and your bus isnt at a standard speed you may have issues with RAID0. Another overlooked issue is the SATA cables themselves, dont coil them up, 99.99% of the cables are cheap and will xtalk (I know SATA was to take care of this but it's not the case when you throw crappy cables into the mix)

When I switched to 6" SATA mini cables from coiled up 18" cheapos, my sustaines xfer went up ~6MB and Burst went up ~10MB, there were no other changes to the computer.

Negley97 · « **Reply #8 on:** March 25, 2006, 12:08:13 PM »

RAID 1 is your best bet with only 2 drives. I've never been a fan of RAID 0 for the simple fact that if 1 drive dies both drives are rendered useless. RAID 5 is a great but requires that 3rd drive and all 3 must match size wise otherwise the array goes to the smallest drive (same is true with RAID1).

Great to hear you didn't lose anything, at least you got a wake up call to ditch RAID 0

sully! · « **Reply #9 on:** March 25, 2006, 06:11:31 PM »

Quote from: "Zx2Slow"

If you have you PC overclocked, and your bus isnt at a standard speed you may have issues with RAID0. Another overlooked issue is the SATA cables themselves, dont coil them up, 99.99% of the cables are cheap and will xtalk (I know SATA was to take care of this but it's not the case when you throw crappy cables into the mix)

When I switched to 6" SATA mini cables from coiled up 18" cheapos, my sustaines xfer went up ~6MB and Burst went up ~10MB, there were no other changes to the computer.

Nope, no OC'ing on this machine at the moment. Haven't had a need to really. My theory of what happened is more power related.

After getting back from the LAN and bringing my stuff inside, I collapsed and went to slept for about 18 hours, not waking up until the next morning. When I got around to hooking up my PC Monday evening, I realized I forgot to bring my UPS in, which was still in the back of my gf's van and she was at work. So I just hooked into the wall. I know my apartment has several power fluctuations on a regular basis because I can hear the UPS on my server and my gf's PC switch on and off repeatedly sometimes late at night for a span of about 30 seconds.

But for about a day and a half I had no power protection against brownouts or surges and I think that may have corrupted the RAID definition and the couple of files chkdsk found after I got things working again. I learned the value of an UPS many years ago and I refuse to use anything less (ie, just a surge protector). Since I have been using an UPS, I have had zero hardware failures (excepting this most recent problem, because I wasn't on an UPS when it happened).

zx2slow · « **Reply #10 on:** March 25, 2006, 08:31:54 PM »

Yeah bad power can do funny things, and with that much hardare running in the same room im positive there were some issues.

The Shoctor · « **Reply #11 on:** March 27, 2006, 08:19:13 AM »

OMG Hardware running in the same room! Better tear down those data centers!

cuzzNkev · « **Reply #12 on:** March 27, 2006, 09:15:31 AM »

I just got a new UPS this weekend (the old one was way to small). I was surprised to find out that while watching the Sopranos last nite, the UPS kicked in on the system as I didn't see anything on the TVs, lites, etc downstairs.