Re: Paul and Old Man: Cannot fix RAID5 failure ...

To Pual and Old Man,


Power Supply
=========
Thx for the great PSU calculator.

It calculated 282W (without motherboard, wireless mouse & keyboard
receiver).
Futhermore, the amount of video RAM might make a difference while the
calculator does not accommodate for this.
Also, most manufacturers do not provide power requirements (motherboards
etc)

To keep a long story short. I think the power supply is close to the edge.
Probably 420...450W would provide enough headroom.
Considering 3 SATA drives spining up after powerdown may cause a 12V
collapse causing serious data damage and RAID failure.

I'll swap the supply for a bigger one, time will tell wether this was the
root cause.


Data recovery
==========
Now I need to concentrate on raid array or data recovery (if still
possible).
I removed the drive reported in error, no boot or rebuild.
Then re-inserted this drive, still no boot or rebuild.
Can I force the Intel Matrix Storage ROM (or Windows Storage Manager
utility) to rebuild?

I tried Universal Boot Disc (UBCD) but it won't load the RAID driver finaly
(used F6 key).
I was considering a parallel WinXP installation on a 4th disk, install Intel
RAID driver and
run Create RAID From Existing Hard Drive in Intel's Matrix storage Console.
If this fails, I can always consider Runtimes' RAIDreconstructor.


Any thoughts?


TIA,
John7

"old man" <dl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Ziv2g.8734$4k5.3070@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I had an Atec True pwr, about 350w I recollect, only 3 sata + dvd + matrox
G450.
I kept getting hd degraded then failed - 3 new hd's in a couple of mnths
swapped out - I'm using Adaptec Raid card, from previous experience I have
little faith in onboard raid, Adaptec Tech did state that pwr supply may
be
the cause. Later pwr supply went bang, renewed with Hyper Modular 550w and
no more problems.
This may help, and NB not all pwr supplies are equal
Also if your pwr supply has to few connectors, thus you have to piggy back
connectors, a poor quality pwr may not supply the required pwr
http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp may help

"John7" <NoSp@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e2dspr$t86$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To Paul (and Old Man further down)


Thx for pointing me to the Intel Matrix Storage manual.
As only one disk was reported to be in error, the manual described what
I
expected to happen: auto rebuild RAID after disk replacement.
I did not realize status "Failed" (not "Degraded"). I'm affraid you are
right, more than 1 drive might have failed although only 1 drive was
reported bad.
Probably that's why no auto rebuild starts. The Intel RAID ROM utility
pulled my leg here.
The system owner had a failure before but it recovered fine that time.
Another owner of a similar system also reported a rebuild once.
Please read below as well.


To Old man:

You also might have a point, the power supply is 350W.
The system consists of:
M/B: Asus P5LD2
CPU P4 630 3GHz, Zalmann CPS9500 CU cooler
RAM: 2 x 512MB DDR533
VGA: ATi X550 256MB
HD's: 3 x Maxtor 6L160M0 160GB SATA1
Opticals: Aopen 16/48 DVD rom
NEC 4550 DVD rewriter
Extra's: Pinnacle AV/DI video sampling card.
1.44MB Floppy drive
3.5" Card reader
Case fan 12cm



Maybe power shortage was the root cause. What are your thoughts?

Thx already to both,
John7





"old man" <dl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:BEt2g.8704$4k5.7645@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I might add I had problems with 3 sata drives, mirror with hot swap,
turned
out to be a pwr supply problem
- kept on having one of the mirror drives fail, raid rebuilt with hot
swap,
only to fall over again some time later -

"Paul" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:nospam-2204061155510001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <e2dffn$m63$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "John7"
<NoSp@xxxxxx>
wrote:

Hi,


I built a system using P5LD2 + 3 SATA drives in RAID5.
For some reason the middle drive failed ( Error occurred(0) ).
Intel RAID rom reports Bootable: no.
The system no longer boots (boot failure message / insert bootable
device
msg )
Odd, RAID5 should remain operational even on 2 drives.
Took out the failing drive, still no boot.
Inserted a new drive, no automatic RAID recovery or manual option
to
do
so.
M/B manual and Asus site do not mention recovery (great job
Asus!).
I'm stuck.


Questions:
1) How can backup data from the 2 valid disks ?
2) How can I trigger a RAID rebuild (is there any) ?


System:
M/B: P4LD2, with Intel Storage Maxtrix ICH7R chipset, bios
0815,
BIOS
settings OK.
RAM: 2x 512MB dual bank Infineon DDR533
HD's: 3x Maxtor 6L160M0, SATA1 160GB (1 in failure)


TIA,
John7

Section 21.1.4 and 21.1.5 on page 88, describe what to do for
RAID 5 problems. It sounds to me like more than one drive has
failed. Or maybe one drive failed, and the reserved sector
info on a second drive is somehow corrupted.

ftp://download.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/manual50_oem.pdf

You should realize that there are some classes of faults on these
RAID controllers, that cannot be protected by redundancy. For
example, if all the drives sit inside the same computer
enclosure and share the same power supply, if the +12V output
decides to go to +15V and burn all the disk drives simultaneously,
then it would not matter how many times the data was redundantly
stored. Thus, you should never rely on a RAID as a replacement
system for a backup plan. Backups are still required, and just
as frequently as you were doing them before the RAID was set up.

I'm not experienced enough in file system repair, to know whether
there are any free tools available for inspecting data on a disk.
The first thing I'd want to ascertain, is whether the reserved
sector on each working disk, was still OK. Maybe the Intel RAID
BIOS will tell you whether the two remaining disks are "members"
or not ? I cannot say the interface is too verbose, and leaves
a lot to the imagination. I hope they were clever enough to
use a checksum on the reserved sector data.

What I've recommended to potential RAID users in the past, is
to "practice" with the disks and simulate a failure of an array,
sort of like doing a fire drill. Try this with a minimal amount
of test data on the array, and see if the data survives the
repair procedures, what ever they happen to be.

You don't want to learn how to repair RAID arrays, by working
with your only copy of the data :-(

Another thing you could consider doing, is buy some more
disks, and do a sector by sector copy of the two remaining
good disks. You can then try your experiments on the clone copy
drives, rather than the originals, as you attempt to get your
data back. I learned a lesson the hard way years ago, where
a repair tool destroyed my recoverable data, to my shock and
horror. Now, whenever something bad happens, that is my
first step (copy before trying a repair).

Paul








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