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RAID 5 failure during on the fly expansion process !!!

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by sporty_netizen

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i am having a 2 TB ingrasys 8400R NAS (8 X 250 GB) . out of these 8 disks, 5 have been used to create a RAID 5 volume. while doing on-the- fly expansion on this raid volume and adding HDD 6 to it, one of the HDD's (HDD 2) of the original 5 disk configuration goes bad due to power surge.the system tries to use the hotspare (HDD 7) to recover the RAID. I am not able to make out whether the power surge happened before or after the RAID expansion was complete. currently, the system is in degraded state and it shows (1,3,4,5,6,-) . this probably means that the hot spare failed to take over during the automated rebuild process.i cannot see my shares or use the volume in any manner.... anybody having a solution to this 'cos recovering the 1 TB data is utmostly critical ?

10 replies

by ervin3

Let me start by saying you should have a UPS connected to any critical network devices to prevent such a thing from happening. I'm pretty sure that the hot spare failed to rebuild because it takes awhile for a RAID 5 to rebuild a drive but you still should be able to access your data when in degraded state. I would think something else other than drive 2 went wrong when the power surged. Does drive 7 still work? Have you tried to access drive 7 and have it rebuilt into the RAID manually?

by sporty_netizen

I was having UPS connection...but it is one of those rare events that the entire datacentre went down in the night.....i haven't tried to rebuild the raid manually...i have checked HDD 2 ..its fine....as suggested , i'll further check HDD 7 and get in touch with you...could you plz elaborate the procedure for manually feeding HDD 7 into the RAID volume? i am unable to access the degraded raid volume. ideally it should have been accessible but its not....SOS

by sporty_netizen

HDD7 is showing 64 bad sectors.i have removed HDD7 from the list of hot spares and have initiated the rebuild process again..NAS is now showing high CPU activity...the question is ...can the NAS now use the other hot spare to initiate the rebuild process or it will still look for HDD7 for this procedure to finish ??? any comments ???

by charliespencer

Can we assume after this amount of time that you've given up, rebuilt the array from scratch with the desired number of drives, and restored from the backups you made before you started?

by sporty_netizen

as a matter of fact, i have not started rebuilding the raid from scratch... i am trying to find a way out so that i may get the existing failed raid up and working.. all the data exists in the failed RAId 5 and i have to figure a way out to rebuild this existing setup....i just can't even think of starting all over again. isn't there a way out using some software etc.. i am saying this because the HDD 2 that went out of the raid volume has been scanned and scanning shows no errors whatsoever..

by the listed 'g man'

Your RAID card will have a console you can access at boot time.

From there rebuild to the failed or replaced drives.

This (failed drive) happened on my dell 2850 a year back. Just popped in the new drive, selected rebuild and waited.

by the listed 'g man'

If you want the support it looks like you need then the mfr is the only way to go.

Mind you the ammount of times I have heard a mfr say 'reinitalise'....

Also impressed that sporty had the time to create a TR account & change the name of it before posting...

by sporty_netizen

hey G, i do not have any interface available to my RAID card. my linux based NAS is having a web-based interface to work on....i cannot tweak the settings during reboot process ..!!!

by the listed 'g man'

Raid cards have a console you can access during boot time, when prompted.

Software based RAID is not a good idea for file servers, this just being one of the reasons.

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