RAID 5 Issue

[JGT]

I have a MSI Mother Board P6N SLI Platinum MB which uses NVIDIA drivers for
the MB and RAID support. I'm running WinXP Pro and installed three 1TB SATA
drives in a RAID 5 using the Nvidia RAID drivers. For the past few months
when I looked at Disk Management in Computer Management there was an
explanation mark associated with the RAID 5 array. I did a bit of research
trying to determine why the explanation mark but never found a solution.
Yesterday while working on one of my other systems I noticed that the WinXP
system had rebooted and a light blue screen was present and text lines were
scrolling so fast I could not read what was being displayed. The system would
not respond to the keyboard so I forced a power off. Upon reboot the BIOS
displayed a red warning about the RAID and indicated that SATA2 had an error
and the RAID was degraded. I pressed F10 and and looked at the RAID but could
not get any additional information about the failed drive (I assume this is
what I'm being told about SATA2). While using the F10 function and viewing
the RAID I could either see the SATA2 drive by itself or SATA3 & SATA4 as a
unit, e.g. both drives together. I continued the boot and CHKDSK wanted to
run. If I ran it I again saw the light blue screen with the text appearing so
fast I could not read it. Again I forced power off, rebooted, skipped the
CHKDSK, booted into WinXP. I then started Windows Explorer and attempted to
look at the RAID5, most of the folders appear empty. I then attempted to copy
folders that contained something to a USB drive and I'm told that the $MFT is
corrupt and I need to run CHKDSK. I shutdown, replaced the SATA2 drive,
rebooted, still I get the message ERROR SATA2 and the RAID is degraded.

At this point I don't know what to do. Can I get the RAID back up and
running? If so how?

Have I lost my data (I sure hope not, it represents 100's of hours of work
and I don't think I can replace it.

Suggestions (hopefully a solution) would be GREATLY appreicated.

 

[Paul]

I have a MSI Mother Board P6N SLI Platinum MB which uses NVIDIA drivers for
the MB and RAID support. I'm running WinXP Pro and installed three 1TB SATA
drives in a RAID 5 using the Nvidia RAID drivers. For the past few months
when I looked at Disk Management in Computer Management there was an
explanation mark associated with the RAID 5 array. I did a bit of research
trying to determine why the explanation mark but never found a solution.
Yesterday while working on one of my other systems I noticed that the WinXP
system had rebooted and a light blue screen was present and text lines were
scrolling so fast I could not read what was being displayed. The system would
not respond to the keyboard so I forced a power off. Upon reboot the BIOS
displayed a red warning about the RAID and indicated that SATA2 had an error
and the RAID was degraded. I pressed F10 and and looked at the RAID but could
not get any additional information about the failed drive (I assume this is
what I'm being told about SATA2). While using the F10 function and viewing
the RAID I could either see the SATA2 drive by itself or SATA3 & SATA4 as a
unit, e.g. both drives together. I continued the boot and CHKDSK wanted to
run. If I ran it I again saw the light blue screen with the text appearing so
fast I could not read it. Again I forced power off, rebooted, skipped the
CHKDSK, booted into WinXP. I then started Windows Explorer and attempted to
look at the RAID5, most of the folders appear empty. I then attempted to copy
folders that contained something to a USB drive and I'm told that the $MFT is
corrupt and I need to run CHKDSK. I shutdown, replaced the SATA2 drive,
rebooted, still I get the message ERROR SATA2 and the RAID is degraded.

At this point I don't know what to do. Can I get the RAID back up and
running? If so how?

Have I lost my data (I sure hope not, it represents 100's of hours of work
and I don't think I can replace it.

Suggestions (hopefully a solution) would be GREATLY appreicated.

I'm sure there are plenty of companies that will offer you
data recovery software for a price. This is the first thing
that popped up in a search. (Apparently, the ability to move
Nvidia RAID disks, to some other chipset.)

http://www.diskinternals.com/raid-to-raid/

If you're going to recover the data, potentially you'll need some
place to put it. You should be aware that there is a 2.2TB limit
to simple storage on Windows, and you should learn what mechanisms
and limitations there are in the workarounds. (I have no experience
with this, but I've heard about it.) I've run into at least one individual,
who stored 1KB more than the 2.2TB number on his array, and Poof! It was
dead. So learning about that limit first, will prevent some future hair
loss. So if you're building a recovery array, to transfer the data off,
then you should be careful with its usage and construction.

This article is a discussion by people actually working with large arrays.
I understand as well, there is some issue at the hardware level. An Areca
RAID card, for example, has an option to change the definition of a sector,
as a work around for some 2.2TB limit. A sector would normally be 512bytes,
but by defining a sector to be up to 4KB, an array can be made larger,
up to 16TB. The idea in that case, is to limit the sector number in a
request, to a 32 bit number. I don't see that discussed here. And as
some of the participants here mention, it isn't always easy to find
out what the limits might be.

http://www.carltonbale.com/2007/05/how-to-break-the-2tb-2-terabyte-file-system-limit/

This is an Areca manual, which hints at a few tricks they offer at
the hardware level. You might not find capabilities like this
in the Nvidia software.

http://www.areca.us/support/download/RaidCards/Documents/Manual_Spec/Over2TB_Manual.zip

Paul

 

[JGT]

Paul super thanks for your feedback.
(1) I'm aware of the 2.2TB limit in WinXP, this bit me before. I have
several 1TB eSATA drives connected to the system and several USB 2 (200GB,
250GB and 400GB) drives as well. Currently I plan to try the DiskInternals
raid recovery application (http://www.diskinternals.com/raid-recovery/). If I
can recover any of the data I will dump to the external drives. Actually I'll
copy using SyncBack (http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/), I've used it
for a few years and I'm happy with it. Most of the folders are less than 1TB
thus it will be easy to copy these to the smaller drives but I have one
folder, if I recall correctly, that is larger than 1TB thus I'll have to
break this up into a couple of folders.

Prior to moving to RAID 5 arrays I had all my stuff on USB drives and would
have mirror copies of all the drives. When the drive count hit 22 and I
encountered a ton of USB 2 issues along with a LOT of data loss I moved to
RAID 5. WinXP with the 2.2TB limit has been a problem for me. When I rebuilt
my system a few months ago I attempted to install WinXP x64 but the install
informed me that my system was not compatabile. I was in a rush to get the
system back up so I just reinstalled WinXP x32. I'm not sure what the x64 did
not like on my system but I'm sure it is something simple, the MSI MB has a
dual-core processer and per the MSI website the board supports x64.

I'll take a look at the other documents after exploring the DiskInternals
tool.