Degraded Raid 5

[TimberJon]

I have 3 WD Raptors in a Raid 5 (Non-5EE) and one drive errored, rebuilt itself on my command, then failed some unknown time later. Within a week or so. I dont reboot this system very often as it doubles as my file server.

SO! Got a replacement raptor from WD and put it in. Didnt do anything until I rebooted it. When I did, it asked me in bios (prior to win startup) if I wanted to rebuild it, I said yes and it started up. I opened my Intel Matrix storage controller and viewed the rebuild. It slowly chugged along and when it hit 10%I left it alone and tended to other work.

Later in the day when I checked the system, the disk was not rebuilt, and instead showed itself as missing. It was not listed in my array.

NOTE: Before I rebooted the system, the missing hard drive icon popped up in my array list, below the 3 hard drives. So I had 3 discs shown, the third with the error on it, and then a missing item below. Now my 3rd disc is gone and the "missing" icon took its place.

What happened to the RAID 5 rebuild? I read somewhere that the rebuild is tricky and is not always successful. I wont be able to reboot the system until the end of the day.

 

[Nodsu]

Check the Event Viewer or some other log for more specific errors.
Also, it would have been a good idea to let the thing rebuild without booting to Windows. The less interference you have, the better the results.

Did you get an identical Raptor? Even if the new drive is a single sector smaller than the original, the rebuild will fail.

 

[TimberJon]

I will check the event viewer as best I can and post anything that looks suspicious.

It would not let me rebuild within bios, only told me that it would rebuild after windows startup, and it did.

Yes. as far as I know, the replacement Raptor is matched serially.

 

[TimberJon]

ftdisk. Event ID: 57 on 6/20/07
The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.

another one on the 25th.

6/28/07

Two identical events. ID: 9 iaStor
The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period.

One Event ID: 7011 Service Control Manager
Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the NtFrs service.

 

[sliderule101]

TimberJon,

Had this problem once myself, check the power connector to the drive. sometimes the leads spread apart enough or do not make good contact and it will intermittent.

This occurred on a 2TB RAID-5 I was working on in a server enviroment.