Hey everyone, first time poster long time reader 🙂
I’ve got an interesting issue I can’t seem to find an answer for… Here’s the situation:
3 x SuperMicro SuperServer’s all 3 superservers were placed on brand new 700/1400 series APC UPS’s.
1 x 6025B-8R+B
1 x 6023P-B
1 x 5015P-TB
Both were using the same SCSI controller AIC-7902
the 5015P was using a Intel Matrix RAID chipset
Configured on RAID 1 array, these systems were fully operational and had been through multiple reboots to be honest probably about 15 reboots, after installing SQL all updates, PCA and all the usual new install updates….
The systems were fine until 2 different problems happened.
The first problem came as a NTLDR failure after a simple reboot after PCA was installed, the same issue happened during a routine reboot, nothing was installed or updated/changed.
This happened all on the same site, over a 4 month period….
My question is what would cause a NTLDR failure at random times all on a RAID array????
I’ve looked at environment and nothing seems outta the ordinary, its a small business w/ a small office as its server room housing 1 file server our SQL and scripting server, and 2 UPS backups, w/ 2 gigabit switches….
My concern is, this NTLDR issue happend on both a RAID 1 array, and RAID 5. So far the 3rd rebuild hasn’t had issue’s. Its using the SCSI onboard chipset w/o the ZCR card.
Now I know you’ll say, well maybe its the ZCR RAID card I installed, well no as I’ve now experienced this on both boxes using both cards. Both cards were brand new from my VAR.
Now the other issue i’ve noticed w/ this customer is 2 of the 4 array builds have become impacted. 1 instance was a SCSI RAID 5 array, the other was a RAID 1 SATA array. All my drives were high quality Seagate drives, I’ve bought over 600 in the past 3 years w/ less then 15 dead drives over that time.
Now my understanding is that an ‘impacted’ array means somewhere in the syncronization either bad sectors or corrupted data was put from Drive 0 to Drive 1. I’ve attempted to repair the arrays but no good, i deleted and recreated the array, and automatically it goes to impacted state. Now to make matters more interesting the newer SCSI box had a HD0 failure which basically took the array info with it.
The drive had died, causing Windows to do a KDump (Kernel Dump) and then after that point the array was almost impossible to rebuild. Luckily I was able to ‘force’ the array online just enough to grab data but the array showed impacted.
So I’m confused and I REALLY need help, I’ve searched everywhere and can not narrow down a answer, please please MCSE people RAID Hardware specialists lend me your advise. I’m stumped and my companies already spent 15k on there systems, trying to narrow the problem down.