RAID 0 disk failing, trying not to lose data

ElShotte

Posts: 167   +19
Hey guys,

Long story short, one of the HD's in my RAID 0 array was being reported as failing. Intel Matrix Storage Manager gave me a message inside of windows, and on boot the RAID controller said the disk was failing as well. So, I went and got another HD of equal size. The old HD is WD3200KS and the new one is WD3200JS, so theyre pretty much identical. I booted up with only the new and old drives in my PC, into Ubuntu Live CD, got the ddrescue package and cloned my HD. Now, I reconnected all my old drives where they were, replacing the old failing one with the new cloned one. At boot, the RAID Manager gives me Unknown Member for the new drive, and the 2nd drive in the array is marked Member Offline. What to do? I fear that if I remove the drives from the array and create a new one, Ill loose all the data. Im stuck. Help!
 
Hi, I'm no expert on RAID set ups but found this guide below which may help. It describes the process you have used but there may be some important parts of the process that you missed, notably that you have not used an identical drive to clone to and the disconnection of the drive from the array before cloning.

This information came from here where there are a few other posts that may be usefull.

http://ask.metafilter.com/66389/how-to-clone-failing-disk-in-RAID-0-array


Any number of drive cloning tools exist that will make exact sector copies. Acronis True Image or Symantec Ghost are often used by Windows users, but many freeware options exist in the UNIX world, such as dd command line tool, which you can run off a bootable Ubuntu or Knoppix CD. You make a bootable disk or CD, disconnect your failing drive from the RAID array, and put it on one channel of a basic IDE or SATA disk controller (pull your RAID controller if its not motherboard based - if it is, you'll have to break the RAID in BIOS, after powering down and disconnecting drives). Plug in a second drive on that same controller, and boot off the bootable media you made that contains the clone tool. Use the clone tool to clone. Substitute the clone drive in the RAID array.

For this to work however, you have to use identical models of drives, and your RAID controller needs not to have put drive markers in the MBR of the drives that have been computed from interrogating drive firmware. Some controllers are easy to fool, and others, with better security awareness, are very tough to fool.

RAID 0 as your primary storage is no way to run a PC, as PC grade hardware is nowhere near reliable enough to do this without recurring trouble. And RAID, even RAID 5 or 6, is no substitute for backing up.
 
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