RAID 5 worries

This is normal, as the configuration was lost and you restored it. The raid contoller is doing a check of the drives.

It sounds like the contoller is doing a verification of the drives. which involves a complete low level test of all the sectors. if any are bad then these are mapped across all the disks and the data and parity information is re-striped. It can take ages, especially if the array is being accessed at the same time.

The quick answer is - if you can access the data then all should be well. If you can't see anything then the config is gone.

Message Edited by pcmeiners on 08-01-2005 10:01 AM

Message Edited by pcmeiners on 08-01-2005 10:07 AM

Thanks for the info.

My RAID array is currently in background initialization, and it looks like it won't finish for another day or so. I'm hoping that it will resurrect once this is complete.

A power outage can wreak havoc with a raid controller/disks. A problem is corrupt parity info or corrupt config or dirty cache.

another way would be power everything down, remove the raid card from the server (observing ESD),pop the cache/battery from the card, leave it for a minute or so. Then put it all back. Power up the array, give it 5 mins to totally boot and settle down then boot the server. As the card has been cleared it should pick up the config from the disks

                                                                       OR

Before you take the drastic step of manually initialising the array (all data will be gone). I would, wait for the background stuff to finish, check the state of the array. If you can access your data, BACK IT UP.

Reboot the server and ctrl-m or a into the raid bios. If you have an ami/lsi based card, select the correct adapter and look in the menu for physical objects, select this. A scan of devices will happen and a screen opens with the attached devices in slot/location order. Here you will see failed drives, they may show as failed or ready. A good disk shows as online. If you know which disks makes up your raid configs you can up the up/down arrows to move about. the space bar selects or de-selects the disk. So select a failed/ready disk then press F2, a sub menu will appear, here you can force the drive on-line. A warning message will appear. If your are sure go ahead. Once you have done all you need, run the consistancy check on the raid logical disks. This will take ages so do it over a weekend because the server will be stuck in the raid bios until complete. Consistancy check should repair any error in the raid disk.

If it works, you have repaired your raid, if not then you have made a backup and can re-create your raid structure and restore your data.

Here is the update:

The background initialisation process has completed. And the volume has a status of 'Ready'

In windows disk management there are two entries for this drive.

1. A new disk with status 'Not Initialized' & 'Unallocated'

2. A 'missing' volume representing the old volume

There is another issue that I think I've spotted. The old configuration was an array of 13 disks in RAID-5 with the 14th Disk assigned as a global hot-spare

If I look in array manager, there is no disk assigned as a global hot spare, and more importantly, perhaps, rather than drives 0-9 & 10-14 being the array drives with drive 15 being the GHS, In array manager Drives 1-9 and 10-15 are listed as the array drives.

Question 1: Can I attempt to reconfigure the array so that the configuration matches the old one (it looks like this is all wrong)

Question 2: If the answer to Question 1 is Yes, can I cancel background initialization (if it starts) considering that it completed safely already so that I don't have to wait 36 hours to see if the volume has been resurrected.

My only other alternative I think is to ship this array at some expense to Data Recovery

Thanks for your help so far.

Regards,

Paul

Message Edited by pcmeiners on 08-04-2005 03:11 PM

Hi,

Thanks for all your help and advice to date.

I rebooted the server, and entered raid bios. I reconfigured the array as I remembered it. ie. drives 0-9 + 10-14 with disk 15 as a global hot spare (i.e. the original configuration)

I then created the logical drive, saved the configuration, rebooted.

The drive is now back online and the data is viewable. It didn't enter 'Background initialisation' this time around.

I'm currently running a consistency check on the array, and pending a successful result of that I may actually get some sleep again.

For others who may read this post in the future, I was careful (with advice given herein) not to perform any operations on the array that would result in physical data changes.

Regards,

Paul

Message Edited by pcmeiners on 08-04-2005 03:09 PM

Message Edited by pcmeiners on 08-04-2005 03:09 PM