RAID5 with one or more failing disks

LoboLobo
edited February 2007 in Hardware
I've have the raidrocket 454. The 454 is setup as a RAID 5 with six 250GB ATA Hard Drives (and the biggest power supply compusa sells). I've been using the raid drive for over 3 years without too many problems (had to rebuild a broken array 4 or 5 times, and replace one drive)....until a few weeks ago. The alarm went off and I thought I'd just need to restart the PC and rebuild the drive...didn't work....I thought I had a bad drive so I bought another one and replaced the "bad" one. I started the rebuild process....it would get a few hours into rebuilding and the alarm would go off and the raid would go offline. After a few attempts I decided to shut off the PC...since I could still access my files, I thought I would get something to move the files to before I used the PC again. Well, here I am with three spanned 500GB drives...the files started moving over smoothly enough (the first 100 gigs atleast) but as I went deeper into subfolders to move files (some of my files are 6 to 7 subfolders deep, containing as many as 800 files in them) The more trouble I've had. I run into a file it doesn't want to move and I here the alarm go off...I Think I've had to restart my PC 30 times today. A few folders with over 100 gigs were there one minute and the next reboot, they're gone...I know they're still there because I see that the space on the drive is the same as before the folders disappeared. I've gotten to the point that if I try to access some folders with a lot of files the alarm will go off. It seems to me one of the other disks on the raid is going bad. I'm trying to use rescue software to get the data off the raid (i've tried several), but when the software gets to a certain point when it's reading the drive, the array alarm sounds off, and the raid goes off line. I've set my rescue software to ignore bad sectors....Is there anything I can do to prevent the raid from going offline so I can make an image of it? Is there any rescue software you recommend? I think I've done all that I can do on my own.:sad2:

Comments

  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited February 2007
    so do you had one failed drive and one more is starting to fail?

    there might be some better diagnostic tools, what ever you do, do NOT let windows try a check disk on the volume, i lost a few TB that way.
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