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Recover 1-0 RAID
My alienware area51 recently stopped booting up into windows. I checked the bios and one of the drives in the RAID is not being recognized.
Can I assume that this unrecognized drive is dead? How do I go about to repair the RAID?
thanks!
jack
Alienware-Karen
433 Posts
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February 4th, 2013 15:00
jaximflash,
Check into the BIOS, select Integrated devices and under configure SATA 1-6 as, make sure is set to RAID.
jaximflash
28 Posts
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February 4th, 2013 19:00
yes. It is set to RAID.
It was suggested to me that I replace the non-recognized 1TB drive with a new working 1TB drive so the RAID would start to reimage onto the new drive and fix my problem. I ordered the exact same model hard drive just in case that matters. It will be a few days before the drive is delivered and I can try that fix.
Still, I am not sure why the RAID cannot boot up with one non-working drive. That is the whole purpose of a RAID. So I have my doubts that installing a new hard drive will fix the issue.
I'll report my findings here. However, feel free to make other suggestions as they are greatly appreciated.
morblore
2.4K Posts
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February 4th, 2013 19:00
Raid-10 or Raid 1+0 requires 4 hard drives. Are you sure it is Raid-10 and not maybe Raid-0?
If RIAD-10 is what you have then it should still boot with the 3 functioning disks. All you need to do is what you did, buy another one and replace the failed HDD. When you boot it will start migrating the data to the new disk. Maybe something with the stripe is bad.
Have you tried removing the disk that was with the failed disk and try booting off just two? Remove the HDD that is was striping data with and see if it will boot off the other two.
jaximflash
28 Posts
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February 5th, 2013 07:00
I had ordered the alienware Area 51 desktop with RAID-10 (and that is what it says on my order sheet) so I can only assume that is what I received.
Yes, I have tried to boot with just 2 drives. Just to be sure, I tried to boot with every combination of 2 drives - in case I selected the wrong 2 hard drives to boot from. Again, I was not able to boot into windows.
DELL-Kanndy M
55 Posts
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February 5th, 2013 12:00
Hi jaximflash,
I just sent you a PM, please check your inbox :)
jaximflash
28 Posts
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February 7th, 2013 14:00
ok. I finally got the extra hard drive. I placed the drive in the bay where the old failed drive was located. I then booted the machine and waited to see the RAID magically repair itself. Instead I saw the same thing as before: I saw the Alien head boot up screen and then a black screen with an error message that instructed that I add a bootup drive.
Is there some way to force the RAID to repair itself? Or am I at a dead end and need to contact tech support?
morblore
2.4K Posts
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February 7th, 2013 15:00
Last time I did this the system was still able to boot to Windows with just 3 drives. All I had to do was put in the new drive and it rebuilt the array while I was still using the computer.
Maybe resetting the BIOS to defaults and then rebooting and turning the RAID back on will do something. Make sure you have it set to see the RAID option when booting.
cmbergman
1 Message
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February 14th, 2013 10:00
With Alienware being designed for performance I would bet the drivers were striped (raid 0) as opposed to mirrored (raid 1). In that case, all would be lost as the OS sees both drives as a single large drive, writing data in "stripes" across both with each write. You can verify this in the raid config.
jaximflash
28 Posts
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February 14th, 2013 17:00
@cmbergman The drives were set up as RAID 1+0. The 4 hard drives were stripped and mirrored in this configuration. Losing 1 drive should have allowed me to still boot into the OS.
I've decided to replace the 4 drives with a single SSD. The cost to have an Alienware technician come to my house to repair the raid is the same as if I bought a high end 256GB SSD. (I might even buy a 512GB SSD)
I am disheartened that the RAID didn't protect me from a hard drive loss, but going forward, I am going to mirror the SSD on a regular basis to protect me from this problem ever happening again..