Rebuilding raid-1 mirror on SiI-3112

DrDanDrDan
edited January 2006 in Hardware
Hi all,

I wonder if anyone can help me? I have a mirrored raid-1 setup on one of my pc's with 2 SATA hard drives. I have been away and come back to find the card is not seeing one of the drives (channel 0). I haven't yet investigated why this might be... but if, for example the wire has come loose and I reinsert it, can I trust the card to resync correctly. How does it know which of the 2 drives is the most up-to-date? I would hate for it to get it wrong and over-write the currently working drive with data on the old drive. Would I be better formatting the drive it currently isn't seeing and rebuilding the array?

Many thanks,

Dan.

PS - does a standard windows format remove the raid information or would one need to do a low-level format through the raid bios?

Comments

  • DrDanDrDan
    edited January 2006
    Can anybody suggest where I might look for the answer to this?

    Thanks,

    Dan.
  • imp1953imp1953
    edited January 2006
    DrDan wrote:
    Can anybody suggest where I might look for the answer to this?

    Thanks,

    Dan.
    This recovered my disks when I broke my raid 1 array.
    1. Just connect one disk
    2. From the BIOS RAID menu, delete any raid sets
    3. Boot from a CD containing "Active@ Partition Recovery"
    4. From Active Partition Recovery, use Control+[Enter] to find the partitions. As I only had one partition on the disk, I escaped this after it found the first partition.
    5. Write updated partition table to the disk.
    6. Update the MBR on the disk. I used the symatec disk recovery tool, but you can also do it from the XP installation disk.
    7. On the original primary disk, that was all I needed to do. On the secondary disk I had to check and fix disk and partion errors using the norton/symantec tools CD
  • DrDanDrDan
    edited January 2006
    The online disk is working fine.

    It's just that the other disk that went offline is now obviously "out of date" (out of sync). Can I be sure that when I reconnect it, the card will resync from the most recent to the out-of-date disk and not the other way around?
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited January 2006
    They should have an option in the BIOS of primary and secondary. Mirrors only ever sync primary -> secondary.

    Go into the SI bios, make sure that whichever disk is upto date (Im assuming channel 1) is marked as the "primary" disk in the mirror set. Power down the box, connect disk on channel 0. Boot into SI bios, mark it as secondary. Then reboot and it will sync disk 1 to disk 0 :)
  • DrDanDrDan
    edited January 2006
    Shorty wrote:
    They should have an option in the BIOS of primary and secondary. Mirrors only ever sync primary -> secondary.

    Just the information I needed - and this is definitely the case for all RAID cards?

    Just make sure that the up-to-date disk is primary and plug the second disk in. I think it is actually the current secondary disk and it was the primary that went offline for whatever reason.

    Out of interest, if I booted from the out-of-date disk (with the up-to-date disk unplugged) and did a format in windows, will that erase all of the RAID information (leaving me in a situatuation where I could do a manual rebuild)? Or is it only a low-level format that removes the RAID information?
  • DrDanDrDan
    edited January 2006
    What you told me got me thinking. Supposing the primary disk in a set failed and you replaced it with a brand new disk. It was my understanding that the RAID card would just create a mirror of the good disk (the secondary in the original set) onto the new disk (supposedly leaving the new disk as primary). Is this the case?
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited January 2006
    DrDan wrote:
    What you told me got me thinking. Supposing the primary disk in a set failed and you replaced it with a brand new disk. It was my understanding that the RAID card would just create a mirror of the good disk (the secondary in the original set) onto the new disk (supposedly leaving the new disk as primary). Is this the case?
    Professional level SCSI controllers in mission critical servers have OS level utilities to change configuration on the fly (eg.. IBM ServeRAID) :)

    There might be a suitable silicon image utility around that can do the same thing but as it's a "pseudo" RAID card (software based rather than having dedicated XOR processor & so on), im not sure it does :)
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