RAID 5 array with 6 disks 1

[centraladminman]

I have an account with an old Compaq ml350 server and I am not certain of the RAID card at the moment. It is a RAID 5 array with 6 disks. One of the drives failed (36.4GB ultra3 10K) and they replaced it with a ultra 320 drive.

This was an exchange server and a little after they swapped the drive exchange stopped working. So they rebooted the server and upon reboot the server came up with a no OS found message. If you go into recovery mode you can see the C: drive and all the directories in it.

My question is could this be due to an incompatibility with the ultra 320 drive and the RAID controller?

My guess is that this happened because the array tried to resync and the drive wasn't 100% compatible.

 

[wahnula]

My question is could this be due to an incompatibility with the ultra 320 drive and the RAID controller?

One thing you do not make clear: was the C: drive a partition on the RAID 5 array? Or another array on the same card?

Still, it's unlikely the drive change caused the problem. SCSI should be 100% backward-compatible, but will perform at the older ultra3 speed of 160 mb/s.

More likely whatever took that first drive out took out the C: volume. Maybe a flaky PSU or SCSI controller? Or another array drive burning out while the array rebuilds. Simply using an Ultra 320 drive in an Ultra3 array would not have that effect.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[technome]

If you go into recovery mode you can see the C: drive and all the directories in it."

The fact that you can see your array makes it extremely unlikely the array setup is at cause. Generally if it is an array setup issue, you can see a volume or can't. You should have software installed by which you can see/monitor disk health statistics.. I would definitely get monitoring software on it quickly and monitor it for a while.

What might have happened is during the rebuild multiple unrecoverable physical errors where found on the array set drives and were marked off limits. Unless your adapter has a built in util to check the entire disks surfaces on a regular basis, errors can build up, presenting themselves during a rebuild.

Have you tried an "over the top" repair install ?, it has a good chance of getting you going again. Run chkdsk before hand.


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