RAID 1 - Recovery?

[pharma]

I wonder if anyone can help. I have two RAID arrays on my XP based rig. First is a SATA RAID with two Maxtors and they are in a STRIPED (RAID 0, for performance) format and are the boot drive with XP and prog files etc. All working fine. Then, and because I had a prior bad experience, I have two IBM 40 gigs in RAID 1 (Mirrored - for security) which contain all my precious data. These are attached to a SIL 0680 Medley PCI card. All well until today. I booted up and the 0680 (the mirrored raid 1) card reported an 'invalid raid'. It does 'see' the drives in the boot up sequence but obviously recons that the raid set is not good. I don't know why this happened. Normally if a drive went down it would report this and default to the single good drive. I don't think that both drives are going to go at precisely the same time either.
Now, what do I do? I don't want to mess too much with the drives as they contain my data. Can I delete the current raid set and create another whilst still retaining the data?
I would really appreciate any help.

 

[imported_Bunter]

You are probably okay. My wife has a RAID 1 and had a similar issue on the boot. She only has the two hard drives, so the fact that it booted told me everything was okay. I went in and deleted the RAID and created it again, and all has been fine since. My best guess was that one of our frequent power glitches hit her machine as it was writing. That was solved by putting a UPS on the thing.

If you want to be safe, unplug the secondary RAID 1 drive. Restart the machine and you should get a failure message on the boot. Let it boot and check the contents of the primary RAID 1 drive. If all looks well, it is safe to then shut it off, plug in the secondary RAID 1 drive, power it back on and re-create the RAID 1.

If you really want to be safe, back up the contents of the primary RAID 1 drive after you verify them and before you reconnect the secondary drive and re-create the RAID.

The last thing may be paranoid, but Murphy does live on.

 

[pharma]

Bunter - Thanks. Only problem is that even if I dissconect one drive the other doesn't become readable or visible in windows so I can't check the content. (I've tried swapping them.) and the 'Invalid raid' message pops up with the only alternative under the cards bios is to delete the raid set. Is it possible I had a glitch and it's thrown both drives out somehow? Do you think that it's safe for me to blindly delete and recreate the set, and if that fails off to a data recovery specialist...

 

[imported_Bunter]

My main concern here Pharma is what happens when you recreate the set. I don't believe deleting the RAID will cause you problems. But, and I am a Murphy subscriber when it comes to data, there is a risk when you recreate it.

If the data on the secondary hard drive got gummed up, there is no problem. When you recreate the RAID it is going to mirror the primary drive's contents to the secondary, if it can. The message you are getting should be different if one of the drives actually failed, so I will assume it can make the mirror.

However, if the primary drive's data got hosed, it will try to mirror the hosed data to the secondary drive. Oops, you could be copying bad over good.

So the risk (in RAID 1) is in recreating the RAID, not deleting it. If you delete it, you might then be able to read a drive attached to the SATA controller, assuming the controller supports non-RAID activity (it should, what if one of the drives fails? What would the user do until a replacement drive could be installed? Almost defeats the purpose if it doesn't).

I think you are okay, but my heart was pounding the entire time I went through this.....even though I was 99.9% certain it was just a RAID glitch and everything was really okay. And I keep the data backed up! But watching the drive mirroring process slowly count from 0 to 100% and then reboot about drove me to drink. A short drive, I might add.

 

[pharma]

Buner, Don't know if you are going to read this since the original post was a few days ago but here goes...
I chickened out...Yep. After reading your post I marched down to my local Data Recovery corner shop and slapped the two offending drives down and said "I know you've got me by the short and curlies but my data is precious, just be gentle with the bill." All I remember was walking out with my heart thumping and the memory of lots of hands wringing and gleefull expressions. Well, They phoned me a few houres late and told me thay had my data and an invoice. Good news is that the data is all recovered and the damage +- $500. Iam now going to remount the raid and see if I could have been able to delete and rebuild it myself...
I'll post the results for academic interest!
BTW. I can just imagine the feeling seeing the rebuid happening infront of you...I hope the drink was strong!

 

[imported_Bunter]

Pharma,

I don't blame you. I might not have been so brave had I not had the data backed up on 750MB ZIPs. But the thought of reinstalling everything caused me some grief, and a powerful thirst.

Seeing the first percent go by and realizing that, if I was wrong, it was now too late was bad. Seeing 100% go by and then rebooting was worth another drink.

$500 isn't so bad for valuable data. I've heard numbers in the $1k and more range. Oh well. Good luck on the remount. Although, if they are under warranty, it might almost feel better if the primary drive actually failed! At least that would earn a "glad I did that."

cheers!