Raid 1 failure

[Motero]

I have an issue with a Win 2003 server running raid 1. I'm not that familiar with raid so bare with me. Disk 1 failed and says missing under disk management. Disk 0 says Online but Failed Redundancy (System). It appears that disk 1 and 0 both have bad blocks. How can I replace a drive and restore the mirror without losing everything? I assume I need to replace the first drive and recreate the mirror somehow then I can replace the second.

Any input appreciated.

 

[alzan]

It sounds like your Disk 0 is fine, Failed Redundancy means that the RAID controller hasn't been able to write files to the mirror drive (Disk 1.) Without knowing more about the system, I'm somewhat shooting in the dark; but you should be able to to replace Disk 1 and the RAID controller will automatically start the the rebuild/re-synch process to get the drives healthy again. Depending on the size and speed of the drives, that could take from 2 - 10 hours.

It may be a stupid question for a RAID setup, but do you have a recent backup of your critical files from that computer?

Can you get into the RAID controller's BIOS and check the settings for Auto Rebuild, it should be Enabled. If so, and you can correctly identify which disk is Disk 1, then replace it with preferably the same type and capacity drive (it could be a larger drive, but you might lose the extra space.) If it's not enabled then you may have to force a rebuild. It'd be a good idea to track down any and all documentation on your system, particularly the RAID controller to find out what steps to take and in what order.

RAIDs can tricky beasts even for the experienced.

alzan

 

[RebateMonger]

I'm pretty sure that Motero is using Windows Software RAID and Dynamic Disks on his Server 2003. If there was any sort of hardware RAID controller, then Disk Management wouldn't show separate Disk 0 and Disk 1. The RAID card would mask those and they would show up as a single drive.