How to Troubleshoot a 1TB RAID Drive?

[Wes787]

I have two drives made up of 5 drives each - Raided of course

Each raided drive makes up 1.1TB's. I have about 75% filed on each drive and I need to check each drive to make sure there are no errors or bad sectors.

I was curious if anyone knows the best way to go about doing this when I cannot shutdown the PC as it has constant data being transfered to it. This also makes it hard to run a scandisk.

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Wes

 

[attrofy]

I don't know if it is possible without shutting the RAID down. I had a similar experience, and had to get drivers from the RAID CARD and the HDD mfg. Then I had to connect each drive individually to examine them. This worked quite well, but it did require physical disasembly of the RAID. There may be some diagnostic software out there that can read through the RAID, but neither mfg techsupport offered me this option. My guess is if such thing does exist, it would be expensive. However, some of the partition and data recovery software can read through RAIDs so you may get lucky.

One last note, even scandisk and chkdsk will scan the array as a single logical device. They will tell you the health of the logical array, and correct any array errors, but they will not do much for reporting individual disk's health.

 

[Wes787]

Thanks for your reply,

Yeah, right now I'm not too concerned with the health of each individual disk. We are just having some issues with some software we are running and we though it could be a long shot, but maybe the raid isn't working correctly.

 

[attrofy]

Depending on your how new your system and RAID card (or integraded) is, many now have built in health detectors, and will try to sync the data, or rebuild a faulty array automatically (even if it is not crashed). This can *sometimes* be accomplished through the mfg software utility through Windows, without shutdown, but most of them will do this automatically upon reboot.

 

[Wes787]

Yeah I didn't see any health detector software and the card isn't integrated.

 

[wahnula]

SCSI, SAS, SATA or IDE??? Who makes the controller? On my RAID controller utility (3ware) it has the ability to check the S.M.A.R.T logs. Check if your controller has a utility that will log RAID events, a Silicon Image controller I used had a decent utility.

If it is a RAID 5 array it is possible to remove one drive at a time to check it, but that's a pretty scary thing and a last-gasp measure to me!

Tony

 

[Wes787]

Yeah I wouldn't want to be removing one drive at a time even though it should be alright. I don't know whe manufacturer of the card. I would have to check the PC next time I have to restart it. I will see if it has any logs as well.

 

[wahnula]

Wes,

Just look in Device Manager (under RAID & SCSI adapters)it will give you the Mfgr. and model # of the controller, then check the mfgr's site to see if there is a RAID utility. You can install them after the fact and no shutdown/reboot needed, they detect the array and may give you the information you seek.

In any event a utility will allow you what you need, to monitor those arrays for health without rebooting. Best of luck!!!

Tony

 

[PRPhx]

Did your RAID controller come with an install CD? If so, check there to see if thre is any monitoring software. I know HP, Compaq and other manufacturers have monitoring software (either included or as an add on product).