4320 raid 5 issue

[jkresh]

I have a highpoint 4320 with 4 wdeads15 (caivar green 1.5tb) drives in raid 5, one of the drives started showing constant errors in the highpoint web event manager so I shut down the computer, pulled all the drives from the highpoint, plugged the broken drive into the motherboard, rebooted, and ran western digital's drive utility to see that the errors were not related to the array, they weren't so I am rma'ing the drive. When I plugged the array back in I rebooted it is showing the array in the web raid manager but it says disabled, and if I click maintenance it shows the 3 remaining drives and 1 drive as offline, the only options it gives are delete and unplug. I don't have the replacement drive yet but I thought with a raid 5 it would show critical and run with 3 drives, also if I plug the broken drive back in it shows the same thing, it won't let me add a drive or rebuild so I am worried that when the replacement comes I won't be able to fix the array. I don't have that much on it that isint elsewhere but I would like to restore it, and if every time a drive dies I loose the array then that seems wrong. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[RebateMonger]

I've always been amazed how RAID card makers charge tons of money for their product, talk about all their great features, and publish near-zero instructions on how to fix an array when something bad happens. I mean, generally, there's only one or two bad things that can happen and leave any chance of avoiding data loss:

1) A drive fails or drops out of the array.
2) ?????

Hightpoint's only instructions in the manual for this RAID controller:

"Rebuilding a Failed Array
When an array member in a redundant array fails, the array will be listed as broken. A
broken array will be automatically rebuilt using available-spare disks. However, if you
have no spare disks configured, you can still rebuild by manually adding an Available
Disk to the array. To add a disk to a broken array:
1) Select menu ?Manage - Array?.
2) Highlight the desired RAID array
3) Click the ?Maintenance? button.
4) Click the ?Add Disk? button.
5) If the disk is successfully added to the array, rebuild process will start
automatically. A progress bar will be displayed."

Note that the word "Disabled" isn't even in the manual, except when discussing NCQ and all of those other things that are marginally important, especailly when you are on the verge of losing your data.

Here's a discussion of the "Disabled" message:

"Same thing just happened to me. Hope you have a backup for your data. I personally have had 4 drives die on my rocketraid 2340 and tech support is horrible.
I finally did get ahold of someone about the 'disabled' status and they sent me a piece of software that supposedly would fix it, allowing for data retrieval.

"Hello,

Attached is a RAID recovery utility - it may be able to remove the disabled status. The disabled status is assigned in cases where multiple disks have failed, or the parity is faulty. Try using the all of the original disks first (including the drive originally listed as failed).

It requires that the system be booted to DOS mode, and is able to access the card's BIOS/firmware. It is a graphical utility that is similar to our controller cards' BIOS display."

 

[jkresh]

thanks for the link, i have emailed highpoint and if I don't get a good response from them and if there is no solution then I will simply use american expresses return protection to send the card back and pick up either the adaptec or areca, as I am positive only 1 drive is having issues and this is preposterious. I wen't with raid 5 for redundancy more then speed and if this is what happens when a drive fails then ...

 

[jkresh]

I guess if highpoint doesnt have a better suggestion I could try the raid2raid utility (from sysinternals) to see if I could read the raid off of the motherboard (don't know if it can handle an array built with a highpoint card) then backup any data to a seperate disk, and try making a new array. Up until this happened I was happy with the card, pretty solid performance at a decent price, now I am quite unhappy.

 

[RebateMonger]

Here's something I hadn't seen before from HighPoint - "WebGUI Training"

 

[jkresh]

thanks but I saw that already, and I watched most of them already, nothing seems to deal with the disabled array setting. I guess I could try deleting the array and rebuilding with the keep data option but I am somewhat reluctant to go that route as if there is an easier fix that will probably make this worse. ALso I am tryign tod decide if I should order a 5th drive to keep as a spare (or rather use the 5th as the 4th and use the rma'd as a spare) but if I can't rebuild the array then unless I switch to the adpatec or areca I don't know if I will need the extra spare.

 

[jkresh]

they responded to my email, suggestion is to delete the array, recreate it with the original drives (inlcluding the bad one), with initialization set to use old data, then backup, and add the new drive before running a verify. Just ordered a drive to use for backing up most of it, once that comes in I will give it a shot. I am happy with their quick email response but their documentation is still terrible.