RAID Rebuild

[Guest]

I have a Server 2000 system with five hard drives, three in a RAID 5 on an
Adaptec 3200S controller, the other two with the OS and mirrored in Windows.
One of the drives went bad in the RAID 5, got it replaced and did a rebuild.
Everything worked fine except when I booted the server the RAID 5 drive
appeared in disk management twice. One was online - unallocated, the other
was failed. I got an error of unable to connect when I tried reactivating
the failed drive. How can I get it to come back up without any data loss?

 

[Dave Patrick]

Something doesn't sound right here. Hardware raid is completely invisible to
the operating system. Disk Management would only the see the logical drives
the array controller exposes.

--
Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

:
|I have a Server 2000 system with five hard drives, three in a RAID 5 on an
| Adaptec 3200S controller, the other two with the OS and mirrored in
Windows.
| One of the drives went bad in the RAID 5, got it replaced and did a
rebuild.
| Everything worked fine except when I booted the server the RAID 5 drive
| appeared in disk management twice. One was online - unallocated, the
other
| was failed. I got an error of unable to connect when I tried reactivating
| the failed drive. How can I get it to come back up without any data loss?

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

I think you may be talking about the Adaptec Storage Manager console, not Windows disk management, no?

WIthout getting too specific, the Adaptec/DPT controllers can sometimes be a little dicey on RAID5 recovery, you should boot to the
BIOS for the card and look at what is going on in there. It is possible that the hotspare isn't configured correctly, or it is also
possible that the controller has incorrectly marked a drive or array as dead or failed when it isn't. There are 'secret' keystrokes
to help remedy this, but you should pull out the TSID and contact Adaptec on the issue as this is a recovery situation and doing the
wrong thing can quite easily make things worse. If you have a good backup you may find it simpler to just reformat and rebuild the
RAID5 completely.

Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.

 

[Guest]

I am talking about the Windows disk management. It lists the old RAID 5
drive and says it is failed. It also shows a new RAID 5 drive that is
unallocated. I go into the BIOS of the RAID card and everything is optimal,
now error on any drives.
Thanks,
Rick

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

If disk management shows the disk as "missing" then you can probably delete it from disk management as long as you're sure the real
array is appearing - it may have rewritten a new signature at some point in your efforts.

You may need to readjust drive letters -- it is not something I want to just casually tell you to do since these things can have
serious consequences if done improperly.

As Dave Patrick said, Windows just sees the disk - the RAID details should be hidden by the controller and driver. If not, something
is quite wrong.

Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.