Re: RAID 1 SBS Standard SATA Drives booting up failed

I Agree with Jim. You do not want to make a mistake at this point.

Jim Behning SBS MVP wrote:

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 02:23:21 -0700 (PDT), c8tz <ccholai@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Sep 29, 6:57 pm, "Michael Jenkin [SBS-MVP]"
<michael.jen...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello,

Degraded usually means one of the hard disks in the RAID have failed.
In a mirrored situation (Hardware) then you would be able to boot from
either drive. They should in fact be identical. It is weird that the
RAID utilities are verifying ok. I have to wonder if the drives are
communicating correctly with the system.

Are there further bios /setup options at boot to check out the status of
the RAID?

Does it tell you one of the drives is bad ?

Thanks



c8tz wrote:
Hi,

Due to some power disruptions - our server here keeps rebooting.
After the splash screen of server 2003 it comes up quickly with a blue
screen then reboots again.

We are running RAID 1 - I tried booting off SBS CD to do repair but it
says Hard Disks not detected.

I ran Verification of DISKS using the RAID utilities on boot and it
was ok.

It does pick up RAID disks on boot - it shows as degraded. What does
that mean?

I'm not too familiar with RAID 1 - and how i can go about it - I'm
aware it does mirroring to the other drive - would I be able to boot
from the other ?

Need some assistance on what I can do -

Thanks heaps!

--
Michael J. Jenkin MVP - SBS, MCP, Small Business Specialist, Senior
Systems Engineer
Visithttp://www.mickyj.com

no. It just says : Disk Array - degraded. Doesn't allow me to go from
one disk to another to check .
Just that Array status is degraded.

Would I be able to rebuild array? what will be the outcome of that?
is that equiv to formating drive?

and will i be able to slave the disks on another pc and retrieve data?

You failed to state what brand and model of raid controller you are
running. I had a server refuse to boot with one of the hard drives
installed. I removed one then the other until I figured out which one
was causing the problem. I then ran the hard drive manufacturer's
extended drive test which the drive tested good. I then did a quick
erase. I introduced the drive back to the controller. I booted up into
the OS. I opened the raid manager from the OS> I marked the drive as a
hot spare. The raid manager then started to repair the degraded array.
This was with an Adaptec controller.

I have blown up a few arrays by clicking on the wrong word in the boot
up raid manager. You probably should be talking to the raid manager
support for the proper clicks.

Since you have good nightly backups of the whole server on your usb
drives your recovery is not all that frightening. If you have failed
to do complete backups every night then you need to be careful.

When you boot to do an OS repair you need to press F6 to install
drivers for your raid manager. Your IT consultant should be able to
help with this.
See what SBS support is working on
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/default.aspx
Check your SBS with the SBS Best Practices Analyzer
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/tags/BPA/default.aspx

--
Michael J. Jenkin MVP - SBS, MCP, Small Business Specialist, Senior
Systems Engineer
Visit http://www.mickyj.com
.

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