RAID 1 failure and confusion about how to recover..??

[angelleye]

In this setup I have a RAID 1 array setup as a storage drive. My system drive is a separate drive.

I am getting a Failed status on the RAID, and the drive is not detected at all by Windows at this point.

The company I bought the computer from (www.avadirect.com) is supposed to offer tech support, however, they are giving me very conflicting information from what I thought I understood about RAID1.

I expected to be able to keep running from the good drive, get the other drive replaced, and when I pop in the new drive it would rebuild and I'd be back to how I was originally. They are telling me this is not the case, and RAID 1 will not load properly without both drives in place.

Is there really no way for me to simply run off the good drive? I thought that was one of the benefits of RAID 1..?? If a drive fails, you keep working on the good one and then rebuild the array when you replace the bad drive. No..??

I see this option to "Reset Disks to Non-RAID". Will that format the drives or will that just leave them as they are but load them up as separate disks so I could then easily see which one is the bad one using disk manager..?? As it stands now I don't even know which one is the bad one.

In the RAID BIOS I see RAID Volume 0 has a status of Failed, and then it shows Physical Devices below that. It shows 1 of the drives associated with my RAID array, and then it shows another drive that is not associated with my RAID. It does not show the second RAID drive, though.

The thing is, the one that does show up there says "Error Occurred (0)" in red next to it. So is that the good drive (since it's at least showing up in BIOS) or is that the bad drive (since it says error next to it)?

If I just pull the bad drive would things load up like usual as a single, stand-alone drive?

I'm completely lost here so I'd appreciate any information I can get on this. Thanks!

 

[FireWire2]

1st stay away from (www.avadirect.com) It appears the tech has no clue about RAID 1 (mirror).
Just boot as normal, exam and ID the BAD drive - take it off line HOT - just pull the cable out - YES hot, SATA is designed for hot plug anway
Plug a new HDD in, it should rebuild. if not you may have to re-scan the hardware change

 

[kanewolf]

Before you try anything, I would say BACK UP ANYTHING CRITICAL. I have seen way too many rebuilds go in the ditch with a loss of all data.

 

[angelleye]

@kanewolf, yes I do have another backup source, but it would be a lot easier if this thing will rebuild as expected.

@FireWire2, Can you please elaborate on "exam and ID the bad drive"? How can I determine which drive is indeed the bad drive at this point?

When I load Windows the drive doesn't show up at all in File Explorer, and when I load Disk Management it pops up the dialog about Initializing the disk before it can be used as if it was a new disk, and then it wants me to choose GPT or MBR. I'm scared to actually do anything there so I just hit Cancel.

Not sure how I should proceed..??

 

[Shaun o]

I take it you have at least gone into the main bios of the computer and checked that raid mode is enabled.

And both of the drives as part of the Raid 1 array are both selected with raid flagged for both drives.

And that one of the drives has not accidentally been set back to a Ahci, Sata status.

Just have a check, because if one of the drives is not flagged, or raid mode is set the Raid will report back as failed, or give an error.

It can be as simple as that.
If for some reason the bios for example was set back to factory default settings. Angelleye.

Both drives of the raid 1 array must each be set to Raid as the mode.

 

[USAFRet]

@kanewolf, yes I do have another backup source, but it would be a lot easier if this thing will rebuild as expected.

Do you want 'easy' or do you want 'fast and right'?

Any RAID arrangement should be supported by a full image of the data.
In the case of a drive or RAID fail, rebuild it and bring your data up from the backup.

 

[FireWire2]

I'm scared to actually do anything there so I just hit Cancel.

You did good - your issue is more the just a degrading RAID. it lost its index - Do not go to Disk Manager any more
Dload and run this:
https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html
If your HDD?RAID volume has not been re-format /partition then you can recover the index
One you have the data recoverd. Look at the RAID GUI in OS or BIOS to determine a BAD drive, then replace it

 

[angelleye]

Ok, I installed the partition wizard software and it's doing a quick scan now.

If it finds the lost partition is it going to let me restore without upgrading, you think? It's a 3TB drive.

 

[FireWire2]

yes It will fix the partition problem and your data will be there...Note, take your time read the instruction!

 

[angelleye]

Well, I did read the tutorial it provides, but the action isn't following what it says should be happening.

I was able to do the scan using the partition recovery wizard, and it does find a partition that it shows is Lost/Deleted. It says that I should be able to double click on that to browse its contents, though. When I double click, though, nothing happens at all.

Per the tutorial, I selected that partition and clicked Finish, but then it says to follow that up by clicking Apply. The Apply button is not clickable for me at this point, though. It's grayed out and unusable.

I'll keep poking around in these help docs, but it seems pretty straight forward and it's just not working reacting as expected. Any tips on that would be awesome. Thanks!

 

[angelleye]

I scanned again and the same thing is happening. It finds the Lost / Deleted partition, but when I select it and click Finish the Apply button is simply grayed out. You ever run into that with this software?

I sent them a message about it, so hopefully I'll hear back soon.

Just to confirm, you're saying I should be able to use this to restore the partition, but then of course I'll still be left with a RAID 1 array that has a bad drive. At that point, though, I should be able to find the bad one, get rid of it, and still run on the good one until I get the replacement? Is that accurate?

 

[FireWire2]

I scanned again and the same thing is happening. It finds the Lost / Deleted partition, but when I select it and click Finish the Apply button is simply grayed out. You ever run into that with this software?

I sent them a message about it, so hopefully I'll hear back soon.

Just to confirm, you're saying I should be able to use this to restore the partition, but then of course I'll still be left with a RAID 1 array that has a bad drive. At that point, though, I should be able to find the bad one, get rid of it, and still run on the good one until I get the replacement? Is that accurate?

You may login to BIOS and see ANY BAD raid member, take it out, then boot it up use mini-tool to fix the partition issue if any

 

[FireWire2]

I should be able to find the bad one, get rid of it, and still run on the good one until I get the replacement? Is that accurate? <-- Yes

 

[angelleye]

Well, that's what's confusing, actually. When I get into the raid bios it only shows me 1 of the two drives included in the array. So the fact that it's the only one that shows up would lead me to believe it must be the working one, however, it says "Error Occurred (0)" next to it, which would lead me to believe it must be the bad one...but then why isn't the other one showing up at all..??

 

[FireWire2]

Depen on the failed mode, your RAID may happen to scan the RAID and it stuck as the BAD drive, that is why you can not see ANYTHING
Just remove ONE drive (ANY), reboot, it it should degraded <-- you are good, if still show error switch to other drive, you should be fine then

 

[angelleye]

Please bear with me, I'm not sure I understand something.

I still haven't been able to get this partition restored, so do I still need to mess with that until I can get it restored in order to then detach the bad drive and hope for "degraded" at that point? Or should I be able to go ahead and do that even without restoring this partition?

 

[junkeymonkey]

''just pull out the dying drive and put in a BLANK hd disk. One that does not have previous RAID info on it. The controller should automatically add the drive and rebuild.

maybe you got more going on then meets the eye ?? but a clean new disk maybe key [no info /data on it ]

mirrored arrays are easy to repaired as like said just doing a hot swap of the bad drive rebuilding of the new drive may take somr good time as well its not instant

 

[angelleye]

I guess that's what seems to be different here, though. Not only is the array showing failed, but the OS doesn't even see the good half of the array now.

 

[junkeymonkey]

'but the OS doesn't even see the good half of the array now. '' like I was saying you may have more going on then meets the eye maybe controller failure ??

I don't know if you could scrap the raid array for the time being and set the bios up for single drive use [ no raid to be used ] and just boot to the ''good'' drive as normal ? insure its good

then if it seems to all be intact and good to go then shut down and rebuild the array/' reset bios to raid 1 use and then use 'boot with the 2ed new drive in place and see if it will then rebuild ?

cant say this will work or not just grasping at straws on things to try

 

[angelleye]

I would love to get just get the good drive working on its own again, but I'm struggling to figure out how to get that done.

I see an option for "Reset Disks to Non-RAID" option in the RAID BIOS, but I've been getting conflicting info about whether that will make the drives inaccessible or not..??

 

[angelleye]

Ok, so now I have some more confusion here.

If I unplug one drive and boot with the other, RAID BIOS shows that the RAID volume is Failed, and it has a yellow message as the status of the individual drive that says "SMART Event (0)".

If I unplug that drive and plug in the other one, then the RAID BIOS still shows RAID volume is Failed, and it does display the single drive that is now plugged in, but this time the status message is red and says "Error Occurred (0)". Also, with this drive when I first load the RAID BIOS I get a message "Failed RAID volume detected. Recover volume?" and then I have Y/N options.

I only have that one drive in there, though, so I don't see how it would recover if I said yes..?? Would it fix that single drive and make it work again?

Also, I'm still unsure which drive is the bad one. I'm assuming it's the one that shows Error Occurred in red and displays the message about the failed volume, but I don't know for sure..??

It's also weird to me that it won't show both physical drives at the same time. It does always show a 3rd drive I ahve, though, which is not part of the raid array. That one shows up no matter which of the raid drives I have plugged in, and it simply says Non-RAID Disk in green, and it works fine, of course.

The raid drives will not show up together for some reason, but each does show up in bios if plugged in on their own.

I just don't understand how this got so jacked, and I'm still lost at what I should do at this point.

 

[angelleye]

And now I just unplugged the 3rd drive that is not part of the array, but left the 2 raid drives plugged in. This time it does show both of them in the list, so it seems for some reason the raid bios only shows me 2 drives no matter what..??

Anyway, now when I boot I see both drives, and one still says "Error Occurred (0)" in red while the other says "SMART Event (0)" in yellow, and I am getting the message that a failed raid volume is detected and asking if I want to recover.

Should I leave it this way and let it try to recover?

 

[angelleye]

I went ahead and said Yes to try and recover the failed drive. When I did that the drive that said "Error Occured" switched to say "Member Disk (0)" in green, so that one looks good now. The other one still says SMART Event 0 in yellow.

The RAID status now says Rebuild and it says it will try to rebuild within the OS, so I'm going to boot back in and see what happens.

 

[angelleye]

Well, so much for that. When I exit out of the RAID BIOS Windows then failed to load. I got halted in POST with a message...

SMART Status Bad, Backup and Replace. Press F1 to run setup.

So now I can't even get back into Windows with the two drives plugged in, but at least it seems like I've identified the bad drive.

 

[angelleye]

Ok, so now with the smart error drive unplugged, the system boots with RAID Status Degraded, and the single drive that shows up there shows Member Disk 0 in green. As such, now when I boot into Windows everything loads and my data is indeed there and accessible on the single, working drive.

So at this point I should be able to pull the bad one, get it replaced, then simply plug in the new one when it gets here, and go into RAID bios to choose rebuild, right?