Riad 1 problems

cokecan

cokecan

cokecan

Soldato
Joined
4 Jan 2004
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Nottingham
Hey guys

I've got a Silicon Image Si3112 card in an old board I was using as a file server. I have 2 1TB WD green drives connected to it in a raid 1 array. everything has been working fine since I set it up at christmas until today when I noticed that the system had dropped one of the drives from the array and was just booting/running from the other.

I unplugged the drive that the system had been booting from and ran WD Data Lifeguard to test the drive incase it had died, but the quick and extended test came back clean. So I plugged both drives back in but now I get an error at startup saying "No Operating System Found"

I can't even check or rebuild the array because evrytime I go into the raid card's bios it seems to freeze? I can't select anything out of the menu and the only way out of it is to restart the PC

Has anyone got any ideas?
 
No, the PC won't boot with either of the drives connected on their own. I get the same error as before that it can't find the OS.

Before I noticed that one of the drives had dropped out it was just booting from the single disk like you'd expect, but since I noticed it had dropped out and started testing the drives it just refuses to boot from either.

I've spent today doing some more testing and I now know that both the WD greens are in perfect working order and all my data + windows is installed and present on both drives.

I also managed to get into the Raid Configuration Utility on startup without it freezing. it seems that Pressing ctrl+s instead of F4 doesnt freeze the Raid utility. I've tried to rebuild the array but it complains it can't, it also can't find any conflicts to repair. It does however say that set0 invalid raid disk, so I assume somehow the array has just died?

I'm just backing up some bits off one of the drives now, but I'm wondering whether I can delete the current set and create a new mirrored set without loosing any data?

Also kinda curious as to why one of the drives dropped out in the first place? Shoddy raid controller maybe (it does have the latest bios on it)?
 
I don't know whether it would make any difference but are you sure you've reconnected the drives to same connectors as before?

A drive can be dropped if you have any slow sectors. Sometimes it can take a drive a couple of attempts to read a sector and if it takes too long then the RAID adapter can decide that the drive is faulty and drop it. The RAID versions of drives normally have different firmware that helps to avoid these sort of problems.
 
they were definitely connected the same way round. I just deleted the current set and re-created the array, but i still get the same error message about no OS. Before my windows disk couldnt even find any drives connected, but now I've set the array up again it can see them. I was hoping it would give me an option to repair windows but it didn't so I've started a format.

If this happens again, what can I do? presumably once the array has dropped a drive whether its faulty or just slow sectors etc it won't mirror anything until its replaced?
 
If it happens again I'd try wiping the dropped drive before you try adding back to the array. The controller should then see it as a new drive and use it to rebuild the array rather than seeing it as a drive it has previously dropped.
 
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