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RAID Array Offline? Wont boot! What to do?

post #1 of 18
5/29/04 at 1:05am
Thread Starter 
My Sager's RAID stripe array seems to be out of whack. It wont boot and it claims to be "offline". I thought hard drives, even notebook ones, don't die that easy... Is it dead? Could it be just some silly little thing that is easily solved? Could it have been that it may have ran out of juice while the laptop was in sleep mode? I am recharging it now but I don't think that will help... All that data better not be gone... I dont want to have to send the whole laptop to DriveSavers...
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post #2 of 18
5/29/04 at 1:11am
Thread Starter 
BTW, it is an 8890 of course... two 60GB 7200rpm drives... one disk is present in the disk utility thing the other seems to be missing with just some question marks. The utility program knows that there are two drives there but it can only actually see one.
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post #3 of 18
5/29/04 at 1:16am
Sounds like one of the HDDs went "South". You might try rebuilding the array - see Steve's (Aussie) review of the 8890 in the Review thread. If the Array "setup thing" only sees one drive, then I suspect that it is a bad HDD.
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post #4 of 18
5/29/04 at 1:59am
Thread Starter 
Bad? How could it have died? I have never ever personally heard of anyone's hard drives dying. I have heard my share of hardware complaints from a lot of folks I know but never about a dead hard drive. It seems like a very rare thing. How could this have happened? It wasn't hot, I didn't drop it, I dunno... battery ran out perhaps but it was in sleep mode... GRRRR I can't rebuild, it says that that is not applicable...
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post #5 of 18
5/29/04 at 6:01am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doggonit
Bad? How could it have died? I have never ever personally heard of anyone's hard drives dying.
If there existed an equivalent of the Darwin Awards regarding technological statements, this would undoubtedly receive a nomination.
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post #6 of 18
5/29/04 at 6:47am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doggonit
Bad? How could it have died? I have never ever personally heard of anyone's hard drives dying. I have heard my share of hardware complaints from a lot of folks I know but never about a dead hard drive. It seems like a very rare thing. How could this have happened? It wasn't hot, I didn't drop it, I dunno... battery ran out perhaps but it was in sleep mode... GRRRR I can't rebuild, it says that that is not applicable...
Dude, I myself have helped people out with 4 bad hard drives (all desktops) in the past two years. It's not as rare as you think. Sometimes it just happens for no reason.
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post #7 of 18
5/29/04 at 7:19am
I had a similar thing on my 8890, I was burning a CD when the thing shut down on me for no apparant reason, then when I started it up it said the RAID array was offline because one of the drives was bad. I deleted the array and recreated it as it was before, it offered to format at one point but I went for the quick (no format) option and there was no data loss. This was a couple of months ago, the drives have been fine before and since so it looks like a one off.

Hope you can do the same and that a drive hasnt failed in your case. I wouldnt say hard drive failure is commonplace, but it is the most frequent form of serious hardware failure in my experience (perhaps just behind dead CRTs).
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post #8 of 18
5/29/04 at 7:58am
I had the same thing happen except mine was not rebuildable. I reinstalled the raid array and then it happened again about 3 monts later. Now I just run the two drives seperate.
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post #9 of 18
5/29/04 at 9:13am
Once you start getting disk errors, particularly bad sectors, you should be very wary. If it happens more than once and the number of bad sectors has been increasing you are almost certainly looking at disk failure in the near future. The way this normally goes is the first thing you notice is windows errors. Sometimes you will get an error that will implicate the disk, other times you can be looking at the odd crash, lock up etc. The search for whats wrong leads to scandisk where errors are found and fixed. Everything seems ok again for a while, but typically sooner rather than later you will start to get the odd windows errors again. Then you run scandisk again and sure enough you have disk errors, more of them this time. At this point you should be doing all the backup that you have been putting off because you are looking at losing the disk at any time. While this is more common than losing the disk out of the blue you should be aware that you can lose the disk without any warning whatsoever. Backup is your friend.
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post #10 of 18
5/29/04 at 9:28am
Quote:
Originally Posted by crabman
...Backup is your friend.
Good advice, I backup any serious work onto my desktop via LAN or ftp as I'm doing it, and more complete backups every couple of weeks. For me at least, scandisk shows no errors on my drives despite the array going down. Could be the controller itself that's a tad dicky, which seems to be true in Nandro's case.
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post #11 of 18
5/29/04 at 10:08am
Quote:
Originally Posted by ActuaryTm
If there existed an equivalent of the Darwin Awards regarding technological statements, this would undoubtedly receive a nomination.
Hahaha...agreed.
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post #12 of 18
5/29/04 at 12:41pm
Thread Starter 
I dont know what that fool actuary wants, but to all you guys who offered help I offer my thanks, I will try to delete the array and recreate it without formating... I hope that will work. I guess its time to buy that 120GB external backup drive. Any brands you might suggest? I am guessing that all the major companies have very nice ones...
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post #13 of 18
5/29/04 at 12:55pm
Thread Starter 
No.... it failed... I deleted the array but it still only found one hard drive even after multiple reboots. This is really not looking good. Once I get a new hard drive, I will create a RAID 1 array... I can't lose this stuff again. I might also buy a spare hard drive so that if one in the array fails I can repair it at home without having to wait for a spare or to send it to Sager and back or whatever. Even further, I will definately get a backup drive...
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post #14 of 18
5/29/04 at 1:07pm
Thread Starter 
I still feel that this could be a software problem. Can you recommend anything? Should I call Sager?
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post #15 of 18
5/29/04 at 3:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doggonit
I guess its time to buy that 120GB external backup drive. Any brands you might suggest? I am guessing that all the major companies have very nice ones...
Constructing your own would prove a viable and cost effective option. Bare external enclosures are rather inexpensive, as are desktop grade internal hard drives (to of course be housed in said enclosure).

As you do not seem to be familiar with such (hence the earlier statement made regarding disks failing), hard drives do in fact fail. Unfortunately, as other pointed out, by and large more often than any other single component. By purchasing a more inexpensive, and more readily available component with which to build one's external storage, one avoids downtime and possible data loss. To such end, you might consider a software raid enclosure, making use of mirrored array rather than a stripe, which unfortunately is how you've ended up here to begin with. The necessity of such is greatly dependent, of course, on the vital nature of your data - the more crucial the data, the more it warrants additional steps to prevent outright failure and loss.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doggonit
Should I call Sager?
Dependent upon your warranty, you absolutely should.

Good luck, and may fortune favor the foolish.
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post #16 of 18
5/29/04 at 7:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doggonit
No.... it failed... I deleted the array but it still only found one hard drive even after multiple reboots.
Sorry to hear that. Is there any indication anywhere that a second drive is even connected? It's possible, though unlikely, that it's just a loose connection, and you might ask Sager to check this. Don't get your hopes up though, and it's certainly not worth risking voiding the warranty checking yourself.

If the data on there is really important to you, you could probably have it recovered, although I've never personally heard of that done on a striped pair I'm sure it's possible.
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post #17 of 18
5/29/04 at 9:36pm
The unit must be unplugged and the battery removed and your then free to check all applicable connections. Anti-static precautions should be taken as when working on any sensitive internal parts. This is where you can often go wrong on the internet, I assumed that he had already taken this step. My mistake. Its a long shot but only takes a few minuets and could save a lot of trouble.
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post #18 of 18
5/29/04 at 9:45pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doggonit
I dont know what that fool actuary wants, but to all you guys who offered help I offer my thanks, I will try to delete the array and recreate it without formating... I hope that will work. I guess its time to buy that 120GB external backup drive. Any brands you might suggest? I am guessing that all the major companies have very nice ones...
I use Ghost to an external disk, but don't have any major data on this system so the image is done about once a month.

The few megs I do need an extra backup of I keep on a seperate windows-only external disk (Ghost won't see that disk through the USB enclosure), under XP encrpyted folders on some cases like work stuff or financial/TaxCut saves. This data is also synced to my desktop disks so I always have at least two copies of the important stuff (three if I use the desktop to burn archive DVDs).
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