Disk Management - Spanned Drives Issue

[Guest]

I have three external SCSI RAID arrays of 5 drives each. They are 2 units by
Medea called VideoRaid. One unit has 5 drives that are hardware RAIDed and
the other unit has 10 drives that the first set of 5 is one array and the
second set is one array. They are daisy-chained and connected to a video
editing workstation (PC/Windows XP) through an Adaptec 29160 card. The data
on the drives totals 3.5 terabytes.

The problem is with Windows XP Disk Management. The arrays show up as 3
disks in Windows. These drive sets were orginally spanned to make one large
drive (the W drive). In the Disk Management console, two of the drive sets
are Online but say Failed and the third drive set says Unallocated. It seems
that the span has been broken and the configuration in Windows has been
corrupted. The physical drives are fine. I have checked them in a
pre-Windows boot environment called SCSISelect by Adaptec. All the cables
are connected properly. How can I repair the situtation?

 

[Guest]

Could I use Windows' System Restore to restore back to the point in time
before the spanned volume broke?

 

[Guest]

Youre RAID controllers software would or should bring up the arrays as
installed,doesnt adaptec offer software......Also,go to run,type:cmd In cmd
typeiskPart In DiskPart type:list disk Then type:list volume Type:HELP
for all cmds,sometimes DiskPart will list diffrent than the OS..Also,with
all the
RAID configurations,why not run windows server...Server has 10X the software
specifically for multiple RAID configurations than xp,chk MOM software for
windows
server from microsoft....

 

[Malke]

Youre RAID controllers software would or should bring up the arrays
as

(snip usual Andrew E. drivel)

Andrew, you know so little about computers and Windows that you should
stay away from posting anything about RAID. Stick to the meat products
industry.

Malke

 

[Guest]

You don't say if there is any need to recover data - that could be pivotal to
your choice of action.

Basically, failure of the first disk in a spanned set loses access to the
data on ALL the disks. In other words, spanning reduces fault-tolerance
whereas (certain types of) RAID increase it. It might be possible for a
specialist company to recover the data, but I wouldn't hold-out too much
hope, and it will cost a packet.

There is also the consideration that spanninng is a software arrangement,
and as such is vulnerable to registry corruption. A pure hardware-based
solution which presents the disks to the OS as a single 'drive' is bound to
be more efficient and reliable.

It looks as if you might have to rebuild your disk-array anyway, so if
possible I'd look at putting all the disks into one RAID array. That would
eliminate the need for spanning.

 

[Og]

(snip usual Andrew E. drivel)

Andrew, you know so little about computers and Windows that you should
stay away from posting anything about RAID. Stick to the meat products
industry.

Malke
--
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User

Malke:
Given that Andrew knows as much about English Grammar, Punctuation, and
Spelling as he knows about Computers, he should devote himself full-time to
writing a book:
"Comptrs fr Doomb piples"
Steve