Re: Advice on RAID crash

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How old are the drives and the RAID controller?

Suggestion: Budget for a new box, or at least a new RAID setup.

We had Event ID 15s on a 6 drive RAID 5 array that turned out to be some bad sectors on one of the drives in the array that the controller and the OS did not pickup on. We ended up figuring that out after we replaced the controller and drives and could test each drive individually.

But, we needed to go through some pain to get things back first.

Run chkdsk /f /r on the array. Note that it can take a huge chunk of time to complete.

If it is indeed bad sectors on one of the array members, the problem may not show itself for a while again. Part of the problem is that a chkdsk /f /r on the dismounted partition still may not fix things completely as the bad sector problem can keep growing beyond the bad areas marked by the OS after the chkdks is run.
--

Philip E.
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
http://blog.mpecsinc.ca
"Al Williams" <donotreplydirect@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:eQeaBqkUIHA.4696@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
SBS2003 Premium SP2

Recently our Adaptec 2100 SCSI U160 RAID5 array went down and caused a bunch of errors like this in the system log:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: dpti2o
Event Category: None
Event ID: 15
Date: 08-01-07
Time: 8:18:55 AM
User: N/A
Computer: HISERVER
Description:
The device, \Device\Scsi\dpti2o1, is not ready for access yet.
----------------------
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 11
Date: 08-01-07
Time: 8:18:55 AM
User: N/A
Computer: HISERVER
Description:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0.

This RAID array contains some data and the exchange and SQL databases. Other drives are on another separate RAID mirror, so the server continued to run as best it could but needed several reboots to get going Monday morning (lots of SQL and exchange errors in the logs due to the drive going offline). After rebooting a few times the server has been fine ever since (did a full backup as well).

The strange thing is I checked the Adaptec Storage Manager logs and it shows no errors. As far as it is concerned the RAID array is fine - none of the disks show any faults and the array did not degrade.

No changes have been made recently to the server except for a couple of of the usual monthly winupdates. I leaning towards this being a hardware problem as the server locked up tight a few times while attempting to recover from the issue Monday (gave a STOP 100000ea as well). Could the RAID card itself be having issues?

Any ideas on how I can determine what caused the RAID to go offline?

Thanks,

--
Allan Williams





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