anyone rebuilt a raid 0 array ever?

[kleinma]

I need to rebuild a raid 0 array on a machine where one of 2 drives in the array is reporting that it is failing. It is not yet failed, but likely will do so very soon.

raid 1 is easy to rebuild when a drive goes, but apparently not raid 0 because it is not mirrored at all.

So if I were to boot down the system, remove failing drive, hook up in another system, do an image backup using whatever software (I have PowerQuest Drive Image) and then restore the image on a new good drive, then put that drive back in the array, should that work?

Or in a raid 0 failure, are you just out of luck and need to do a rebuild of the system?

[thijsd]

I have the same problem, but here it says that it is going to fail for like 1 year now :P But i dont have problems (yet).

[Demac]

This may help: http://www.avforums.com/forums/archi.../t-521292.html

[RobDog888]

Backing up your data is the only way. I would trust restoring as it would be best to just clean the drive by destroying the array and recreating it all nw from scratch. Then restore the data.

You should run a RAID 0+1 perhaps so you can get data redundancy at least if you cant run a RAID 5.

[kleinma]

It isn't my system Rob, I would never run a raid 0 array. I was asking for someone else

[RobDog888]

Yea, just change "you" the "they".

[Lord Orwell]

If they have an extra drive to buy anyway, you could simply install the 3rd drive now (assuming there's a place to hook it up) and convert to raid 5. Then remove the failing drive. I am not sure but you should then be able to convert that back to raid 0.
Or...
You can either back up all data using microsoft backup and send all the data over a network connection (take hours) or to a usb drive.

[RobDog888]

The system may not support RAID 5 without an additional raid card ($$$). Easiest to just backup the data and replace the drive with a fresh array creation/installation.

[kleinma]

We ended up just clearing the RAID error back to normal after removing the drive and running it through some drive hardware diagnostic apps and determining (according to the apps) that the drive was physically ok. Then ran all the normal scandisk and all that, and all seems well for now. However I know that isn't 100% of a solution, so we are going to advise they backup critical data, and we reinstall windows on a RAID 1 or RAID 10 array (depending on if they need the performance)

[RobDog888]

Could it be some bug with the firmware or with the raid software?

[kleinma]

it was probably just some sort of concurrency problem it had.. maybe a bad sector on the disk or something. It is really hard to tell, and since the machine needed to go back into production very quickly there was not enough time to really fully diagnose.

We are going to migrate its work load to a RAID 1 or 10 system to avoid this issue in the future.

The messed up this is this guy got the PC from dell, and dell just advertised it as 500GB HD space, when in reality, it was 2x250 running RAID 0, probably saving dell some money somehow at the time by using smaller HDs in raid 0 arrays.

I am sure they don't tell their customers anywhere on the site that having 2 drives in a raid 0 array doubles your chances of losing all your data...

[RobDog888]

Thats Dell for you. I would never buy a Dell. HP over Dell anyday.

[kleinma]

I build all my own machines, however for laptops, yes I own an HP, and I have had 0 problems with it, its 2 years old and runs Vista really well.