Problems with RocketRaid 454

[spainkd]

I have a strange RAID5 problem and while they've been quick to respond
in the past, now Highpoint's tech support has stopped returning my
emails for five days now. Outside of posting here, I'm at a loss as to
what to do. Has anyone had any problems similar to this:

I have five hard drives connected as a RAID-5 on the Highpoint
rocketraid 454. OS is windows XP SP 2. I had a drive go bad and while
it's readable, the verifies failed and rebuilds failed. The bad drive
fails the manufacturer's software testing. It's on its last legs.
Unfortunately, I can't get the spare to take over! If I remove the bad
drive, the HPT374 BIOS doesn't give me the option of rebuilding the
array, even though it lists an identically-sized drive in the Spare
Drive list! If I put the bad drive back in, the HPT374 BIOS will let
me Rebuild, which fails and doesn't swap over to the good spare disk,
or if I Continue and boot up to Windows, I can't Hot-Swap the bad disk
using the "Unplug" command.

Basically, I'm stuck with a dying RAID-5 array. I don't want to buy
more disk space, but I've got to move the data off the array. I'm
probably going to buy another RAID-5 card, probably the $400 3ware, if
I can't get this horrible-interface 454 working.

I have the latest BIOS on the card, but I've been thinking of going
back a rev to see if it'll rebuild a failed RAID 5 array. Has anyone
tried this? Any other ideas? Any thoughts?

Please send me any comments.

Gracias,
KD.
(e-mail address removed)

 

[spainkd]

Went back one BIOS version, then two. Didn't help.

I called up tech support, got them to send me a diagnostic utility for
their cards:

C:\tmp>dir
diag exe 117,154 08-09-03 17:18

HPT3xx Diagnostic Utility v2.0.08.14

It showed that one of my IDE channels failed diagnostics. The channel
"looks" ok -- it allowed me to format drives and build the RAID using
that channel -- but the PIO and DMA tests failed so I guess the channel
is ... flakey?

I shuffled all the the RAID5 drives to occupy the three IDE channels
that passed diagnostics. Still, I cannot rebuild the array, nor can I
get the spare to come into use. I'm going to exchange the card and see
if I can rebuild the array then.

Has anyone else dealt with this type of problem?

KD.