I have an Iomega Datasafe NAS (out of warranty)with 4 76.3GB IDE drives installed in a RAID 5 SOFTWARE configuration, not hot-swappable. OS is Win 2000 ADV Server with all necessary updates. Today the system can no longer see drive ‘D’ which was the RAID array over 260GB.
Under the Win Disk Mangement utility I can see all for drives. It shows ALL four RAID partitions as failed. Disk 0, part-1 has the OS and is fine as the unit boots up. Disk 1, part-1 not used, cannot mirror to it because of I/O error? Disk 2 & 3, part-1 are mirrored and backup for the OS. I read all the post about RAID 5 failures and none seem to fit my situation. I did learn that I need at least 3 drives for RAID 5 to work.
Can this be a software issue with Windows or the RAID utility? Or possibly a virus? Or do I have two bad drives? If drives are bad how do I tell which ones are bad? I did unplug disk-1 and rebooted. No change, still no RAID array. What will happen if I tell the Windows disk management utility to “reactiviate the volume”? Thanks in advance for any assistance I may get.
Bud