RAID1(Mirror) - Initialize Status

Associate
Joined
21 Dec 2004
Posts
141
Location
Bristol, UK
Good afternoon

In my recently built system I have 2 Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA II hard disc drives in RAID 1.

Yesterday I received my first ever BSOD and since then my drives are constantly being accessed, i.e. the HDD light is always on, and the status of the RAID array is 'initialize' in yellow text when it used to be 'Normal' in green text.

I'm not really sure how to proceed to fix it without losing any of my data. I've never really delt with RAID Arrays before and the Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager utility is very basic application that doesn't come with any kind of help.

You assistance in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.
Ian.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
21 Dec 2004
Posts
141
Location
Bristol, UK
Okay, I'll leave it to do it's thing. I just thought it was broken.

It seems to be taking a while, I'm assuming this must be related to the size of the discs, the amount of data that's stored and the fact I'm using the computer.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
21 Dec 2004
Posts
141
Location
Bristol, UK
If it took a while with 2 x 250GB HDD, it's obviously going to take a little longer with 2 x 2TB HDD.

When the system rebooted after the crash I notice some odd behaviour:

  • The HDD light on my case stayed illuminated
  • I could hear the drives being accessed constantly
  • My files were taking a long time to open and applications were slow to respond and execute.

It wasn't until after I had started or rebooted the system a few times that I actually noticed the RAID status was 'Initialize' and not 'Normal' on the BIOS screen. After the status remained there for some time, and due my limited knowledge of RAID arrays, my reaction was that the RAID I had created was broken.

Now I've learned something about RAID arrays :)

Of course I don't know what would actually happen if a HDD would actually fail. I hope I never have to find out, but I'm assuming that it would be as simple as determining which drive had failed, then replace it with a new one.
 
Soldato
Joined
10 Jul 2008
Posts
7,684
It's just rebuilding itself. Could tale a few hours. Could take a day. Depends. If a drive actually fails, you would normally get an indication in sys tray or a pop up from matrix raid software alerting you that the raid array is in a degraded state and could not be rebuilt. :)
 
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