There are some pretty smart computer techs on this forum so I am looking for a bit of advice on an issue that I am having. This is not EZ-Robot related, but is a location that I can go to for some advice from people who may have some experience in this, so here it goes...
I have a raid 5 that has become corrupt. All of the drives report as good (4 drives in the array). The controller isn't able to correct the array. The device is a Seagate black armor Business Storage 4 Bay NAS. The raid 5 reports as failed.
I think I am going to have to image these drives and recover each drive but have no experience in doing this. If anyone has experience doing something like this or knows of a utility that can help in this recovery, I would greatly appreciate a direction. Before you ask, the person responsible for making sure the backups took place was not doing this part of their job, so no backup is available to restore.
Thanks in advance.
David
Asked
— Edited
With Raid 5, you need 3 of the 4 disks for it to work, so if you shut down the drive and remove one drive at a time, then replace it and remove the next. When the drive comes up on 3, the removed one is the bad drive. You should then be able to just insert a replacement and let the raid sync back up (may need to tell your raid utility to rebuild the array depending on your controller and its drivers).
Alan
I recommend following the steps on this site... pretty straight forward for a newb..
http://www.freeraidrecovery.com/library/raid5-recovery.aspx
If you have to follow a manual restore and need software use the freeware: "ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery tool" link is located on the site also..
Although all of the drives were reporting as good, one wasnt. The SMART test that is performed when the drives are attached to the array is a simple one. I ran a more extensive test and identified one of the drives with read errors. I have a new drive on the way in the morning. Hopefully replacing this one drive will allow the array to rebuild.
Thanks Morbeious. I actually was already about to go down that route but decided to try to find if the failure was in the controller or on one of the drives. With this discovered, I will replace this drive and hope. After that, if it doesnt work, I will follow down the process of the link above. I have to wait for a cable to arrive that will allow me to attach each drive individually to image it prior to going down that route so that hopefully I wont get to a point of no return.
Thanks all.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938528.aspx
Previously I preffered western digital.
As for drives, I have built many nas devices and never go with raid 5 for many reasons. I think I dealt with my first raid 5 over 20 years ago when drives were very expensive. Now, raid 5 is a very bad idea. Now raid 10 is the worst that I would setup. Unfortunately, it is the decision that someone else made and I get to clean up.
As for drive brands, I do like wd much better and they are what I use on my nas and have had very good luck with them, but the school bought seagate. Actually for pc's, I have only used Ssd ' s for about the last 5 years. My laptop has raided Ssd ' s in it for the os drive and a third ssd in it for storage, but they just don't store enough for the cost to put into a nas.
Anyway, hopefully the new drive will allow the raid to repair itself. I have a feeling that it is going to take a long time to rebuild. If it doesn't work, we will look at which tools to use to image the drives and which to use to hopefully rebuild the array. I just hope the school figures out that they need backups after this and they let me move them to linux instead of windows soon on their servers.
I would love to have them go with Ubuntu on their workstations but training all of the teachers to use it would be a long process. They fear change, but the environment is so much simpler than windows 8.1. The argument I keep making is that if they are moving to windows 8 they will have to train the teachers on a new environment anyway and ubuntu is free.