Ah. Promise. That's a whole different issue. I don't know if you have their Serial ATA (SATA) or built-in double sets of IDE controllers (wide and gray is IDE, thin and red going to a card is SATA). I don't think it matters in one sense. Either way, what you have is a way to extend IDE to mimic SCSI. I do know from someone who has Promise (he's got onboard dual IDE controllers sets)that the order in which the hard drives are plugged is crucial to how the Promise software sees and manipulates the hard drives. He lost his bootability trying to tweak performance by changing the sequence of the drives. He had to restore the original order of the drives to recover.
When the tech walked you through restoring the RAID, did he have you replug any of the ribbon cables? If you changed the order, that's probably why you can't boot. You can do the math and try all the possible different combinations if indeed the cables were changed and you don't remember how they originally were. I've no idea if System Commander could be the problem unless SysCom is looking for a drive the letter of which has now been changed. Doesn't SysCom keep backup copies of MBRs? It's also a little troublesome to hear that Promise gave you no warning the RAID was down. drew -----Original Message----- From: Furry, Tim [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 10:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [wdvltalk] RE: [OT] RAID crash recover drew wrote: Tim, since it isn't RAID 5, you are pretty much out of luck unless you mirrored. The 3 drives would need a data recovery specialist to get anything useful off them. Do you have backup tape? Tim: It's a RAID0+1, four 120GB drives, striped and mirrored. The problem is, of course, that the controller thought that three of the four drives are offline. Promise walked me through deleting the old array and manually setting up a new array using the same parameters and drives, and now the RAID is functional again (meaning the drives are online), but it's not bootable anymore (it was the boot drive). Apparently the MBR and/or partition tables are hosed; I think the data is still good, because doing demo recovery software scans finds the filenames and sizes pretty well. I've found a couple of packages that will supposedly "reintegrate" a striped pair if they're mounted as regular drives; I'm now doing different scans with that setup. Got ahold of a tech support guy yesterday that seems to know his stuff pretty well (from the recovery software group), so I'm working through on his suggestions now. I don't think it was a virus; at least in my experience, viruses tend to do stupid things like BSOD your machine or something like that. I went through a normal, uneventful shutdown, and the problem happened during the next boot - it never even got to the OS. The only other thing I can think of is that I had System Commander 2000 on one of the boot partitions, and it likes to play swapfile with the boot records - it may have toasted one of the MBRs and it went downhill from there. I suspect this because after setting up the new array it *should* have come back fine; and while it now gets past the RAID BIOS POST, it locks up and says it can't find a valid System Commander installation. Grrr. Okay, okay, I know...next time keep it simple - no SysComm, all one big partition, although I'm real tempted to make it the boot drive again. It loads up Win2K on my PII/400 as fast as my P4/2.4GH at work. Hey, it was a learning experience. :-) Besides, I got the 120GB drives at $100 a pop, brand new Western Digitals. Tim ___________________________ Tim Furry Web Developer Foulston Siefkin LLP ____ * The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM * ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version: http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to %%email.unsub%% ____ � The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM � ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version: http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
