Raid 5 disk 9 failed

[ATBCSLTD]

Hello.

I have a raid 5 box with 4x 18gb seagate drives. last week disk 0 faild and the server would not boot. I replaced the drive with another 18gb seagate drive (the same model) and rebuilt this drive wiht NT with all the other drives out. I was hoping that when i replaced the 3x drives they would pick up to allow access tot he data but the server will not boot.

It seens that if all drives are in the server will not try to boot to drive 0, if i remove the 3x other drives then the server boots OK.

anyone able to shead some light on this and what i should maybe be doing to rebuild the array. I have also been told that the boot dive does not form part of the array in raid 5, is this true?

any advise or experience of simalar problems most welcomed.


Thanks

 

[mttk]

From what you have disclosed... I am afraid you may have lost the contents of your entire RAID. I have a couple of questions for you before I can help you move forward.

1. Are the drives in a Hot-Swap Backplane?
2. Did you mark the drives as you took them out.. in other words... would you be able to put the drives back into the exact position you took them out from?
3. Is this a Hardware RAID or Software RAID?
4. Which model 18Gb drives are you using?
5. What is the Firmware revision of the drives and have you updated the firmware at all?
6. What RAID controller are you using? Is it on-board or and adapter? What is the Make and Model?
7. What other controllers are you using?
8. How long has this RAID been running before it bombed out?

The RAID would have been running in a degraded state and if you used the RAID software... it would have advised you of this. The process you should have followed when you received a notification that the RAID was in trouble is as follows.

1. Identify the faulty drive in the array using array software and ensure that the software has marked the drive as bad.
2. Obtain a suitable replacement drive. (Discuss with Seagate or agent)
3. pulled out the faulty device and plugged the replacement frive into the same slot.
4. Allow the RAID to identify the device and it would have automatically started a re-build... taking about 4 hours depending on the load on the machine and speed of the machine.

Regards
MarkF