HD Help!!!

On my main system my on-board Promise RAID mirror has died. :( It was the mirror that contained the OS only. Now I have a spare new HD but its about 100 Mbs smaller for some stupid reason. I guess I could use it as a replacement drive but its not letting me for either that reason or some other reason.

So I am reduced to posting off of my server. It appears that the RAID software says the failed drive is the secondary one. Now if I delete the array will it delete or make inaccessible my data? I thought you could break the mirror as I have done before on my secondary mirror (Intel) by just removing the bad hd then replace it and regenerate the mirror. Guess with Promise its different?

Anyone know the best way to get my system booted up so I can backup some of the data?

Its a Asus P4C800-E Delux mobo and the RAID Mirror is on the Promise ATA IDE controller.

Many thanks for any help.

On the booting up to recover your data you could just add it as a slave to your Server, back-up everything you need and start again.

But, this is interesting, you should in theory be able to ghost the drive onto another then try and add that to the Raid Array. Although i must admit i've not had much experience with these matters :/

The system will not boot up at all. It locks up usually at the desktop loading part and now starting to lock during the windows logo screen. So I cant get to my data from another system to backup since there are no network access available yet. :(

No no no. I mean, literally take the drive out and add it into your server, just make sure that your server knows to boot form the correct HDD. If not, you'll be cursing while it locks up once more. The options are found in the BIOS. You may not even need them to be honest, my PC (mobo is Asus P4S800SE-MX) detects from Primary and Secondary channels and does it automagically ;)

As long as you have your server you can do anything RD, ghosting via the server, re-imaging the new HDD via the server. Just think about it ;)

But if I add one of th hds to the server then wouldnt it not be able to read it unless I deleted the raid mirror?

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Originally Posted by RobDog888

But if I add one of th hds to the server then wouldnt it not be able to read it unless I deleted the raid mirror?

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I'm not quite sure i follow.

Can you actually physically add the drive that hasn't failed from your other machine to the server ? As in, are there spaces for it to fit ? (IDE Ribbons, etc)
If so, then i wouldn't imagine you would need to delete the raid mirror, and, as your other PC wouldn't even know its disk had been removed then the raid mirror that was broken would have no effect on it.

When its added to your server it will not care whether it has its raid partner, (unless it was a striped array, which by all accounts it seems it isn't) as it will be working in Data mode, and not being booted from.

Windows should simply recognise another HDD for you to store things on... Which then means you can back-up data from it to your Server.

Thats sounds about right I think. Isnt the raid info stored on the mobo raid chip? So if I do move either of the two drives, it will be just like a normal drive with data on it.

It seems the Raid info is stored onboard the RAID chip on the motherboard. As if it were stored on the drives, everytime you format you would lose your arrays...

I still can't find any documentation to back me up about simply mopving the drives over. I mean, i've done it with a none-RAID drive before, so it should work perfectly.

Ok, I will try moving over the one that I think is good. I just finished updating my server so I should be back in a few minutes.

Think I will eat some b-fast and drink another cup of coffee too.

Hehe, breakfast ? I'm thinking about ordering a pizza... Tis the evening here already ;)

Don't be too downhearted if the drive doesn't work, simply try the other one, you may have gotten it wrong :)

Back in 5, going to add my new CD drive to this Pc ;)

I wont. :) Wont really loose anything important other then all my *.pst files and pictures/documents. :(

Everything else is for the most part on my secondary D drive mirror. :)

It would be rather good if ou had fixed your PC and saved the world before breakfast though :)

Oh, and this CD Drive i'm referring oo, its not new, i bought an old machine for £1, just for the CD drive, 40x read speed. I just want it for when i'm duplicating my applications on disc on the fly, should shave 2 or 3 minutes off ;)

Keep me up to date on the news concerning what you have/havn't lost on this drive :)

Man i need pizza now.

Ok, will do. I'm just waiting for the water to biol before I start making the food. Not sure what I will make as its almost lunch time now. :D

For gods sake, i installed the CD drive, and my already installed DVD-RW dissappeared, what's going on here ?

Sorry, just thought i'd let you know what was happening.

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Originally Posted by thegreatone

For gods sake, i installed the CD drive, and my already installed DVD-RW dissappeared, what's going on here ?
Sorry, just thought i'd let you know what was happening.

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Did you rememeber to change the primary/slave jumper pin on the back of the drive? Probably have both set as "primary" or both set as "slave"

P.S. Sorry for posting off topic here, Rob, but blame him :)

Rob - I'm assuming this is not a RAID-array - like I have on my server - but some kind of "drive-to-drive" mirroring - right?

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Originally Posted by gigemboy

Did you rememeber to change the primary/slave jumper pin on the back of the drive? Probably have both set as "primary" or both set as "slave"

P.S. Sorry for posting off topic here, Rob, but blame him :)

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*Chuckles* I DID forget to set the jumper pins... hehe

And Szlamany, search for Promise Raid Array, they are actually manufacturers of Raid chips and the likes.

(Sorry for the off-topic Rob, just had Jam on toast and a hot chocolate ;) Forgot to order Pizza ya see...)

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Originally Posted by thegreatone

And Szlamany, search for Promise Raid Array, they are actually manufacturers of Raid chips and the likes.

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I am just looking at some sites I googled...

So basically Rob has a mirror (raid 1) - doesn't this mean that the two drives are "kept identical".

So if one "drive" is flakey - isn't the other "ready to run" without the "mirror"?

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Originally Posted by szlamany

I am just looking at some sites I googled...

So basically Rob has a mirror (raid 1) - doesn't this mean that the two drives are "kept identical".

So if one "drive" is flakey - isn't the other "ready to run" without the "mirror"?

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Thats what i originally thought, but it seems otherwise, as he says. It won't let him replace the faulty disk because of a minor discrepency of 100Mb's or so.

Not much we can say now,, other than wait for him to get back to us with the news.

I bet he's still eating breakfast ;)

Rob - this link has a lot of Promise info...

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/28/2143208

I googled for: "promise raid" "break the mirror" - got lots of links...

Good luck - I hate hardware failures!

Great link Steve., Thanks.

Good news guys. I got the failed drive added to my server on the second try. It was the slave drive in the mirror. Yes, steve, I am running a software raid 1 mirror where each drive is a mirror copy of the other. I have one mirror for my OS and another mirror for my D drive data (dual mirrors consisting of 4 drives). I like mirrors since this is now my 3 HD failure in just over 2 years. I can access all my C drives data now and am going to be copying it over to the server's drive later. At least now I can relax a bit. :) I spent most of the day doing some spring cleaning and stuff. Too tired to really get into all of it right now. I did have a good breakfast, lunch, and dinner. :)

According to my Promise FasTrack utility, it was the secondary drive but as I found from trying to add it to my server it wasnt. It was the primary one that was bad. Whew, dodged a real bad bullet here. This is why I only run RAID Mirrors :D

Looks like there may be a link between defragging and the promise controller but I only use the windows defragger. Seems each of the times I had the hd failures I had done a defrag recently.

Now I need to either look for a replacement of the bad one or 2 new different maybe larger drives ASAP.

If you remove/disconnect just the bad drive you should be able to boot again, it'll probably give you a warning. I'm not suppirsed the 100MB smaller drive wouldn't work as a replacement, it would work if you rebuilt the array though (it'll just chop 100MB offthe other drive). Also just because you could add the second drive to your server doesn't mean it's good. I don't think either drive is dead, there's just errors on it. If the drive was totaly dead then it'd just boot from the other and wouldn't crash. If I where you I'd run a full check disk on it.

Oh and BTW on-board Promise RAID would be considered (although not very highly) hardware raid.

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Originally Posted by RobDog888

Great link Steve., Thanks.

Good news guys. I got the failed drive added to my server on the second try. It was the slave drive in the mirror. Yes, steve, I am running a software raid 1 mirror where each drive is a mirror copy of the other. I have one mirror for my OS and another mirror for my D drive data (dual mirrors consisting of 4 drives). I like mirrors since this is now my 3 HD failure in just over 2 years. I can access all my C drives data now and am going to be copying it over to the server's drive later. At least now I can relax a bit. :) I spent most of the day doing some spring cleaning and stuff. Too tired to really get into all of it right now. I did have a good breakfast, lunch, and dinner. :)

According to my Promise FasTrack utility, it was the secondary drive but as I found from trying to add it to my server it wasnt. It was the primary one that was bad. Whew, dodged a real bad bullet here. This is why I only run RAID Mirrors :D

Looks like there may be a link between defragging and the promise controller but I only use the windows defragger. Seems each of the times I had the hd failures I had done a defrag recently.

Now I need to either look for a replacement of the bad one or 2 new different maybe larger drives ASAP.

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Just to add to that, it's the larger drives that tend to be more prone to failure, so upgrading the size again may not be a great idea.
Mind you, in a RAID array it shouldn't matter as there are back-ups.

Glad to hear that everything went smoothly again though :thumb:

I'm not out of the woods yet. I am getting ready to delete the array and see what happens. I think its supposed to set it back to a regular drive without deleting the data. It depends on if I can get an exact replacement hd. If I cant then I will probably upgrade to 60 or 80 gig drives. Currently I am mirroring two 40 gig ATA 133 drives for my os C drive. Then I have two SATA 120 gig drives for my D drive to hold my programs and data.