Failed Disk Netcell RAID 3 - Cant rebuild - Please Help!

The Netcell Storage Manager software informed me via e-mail today that one of the drives in my 5-drive (RAID3) array had failed. (I thought the e-mail stated it was the drive attached to port 0.) I powered down, replaced the drive attached to port 0 on my Revolution SR5000 card, and powered the system back on.

As soon as the drives started to spin up, one of the other four started clicking. After a few seconds, the drive powered itself down. The output from the Netcell card BIOS said that it had failed to initialize. I re-checked the e-mail and realized it referred to array 0 on card 0, but did not specify the port of the failed drive.

I powered the system down again and re-attached the old drive to port 0. I then replace the clicking drive that was attached to port 4.

This time, the Netcell card BIOS initialized successfully and showed "Status: Incomplete Array(s) Found." I thought that looked promising. However, when I accessed the BIOS' text-based configuration screen, there was no option to rebuild the array. Drives 0 - 3 had a # in the listing, indicating a partial array. The Array Map listed four arrays, each with a status of "Array not defined." I exited without making any changes.

Once I had logged into Windows, the Storage Manager Wizard popped up and offered to guide me through configuring the unused drives attached to the Revolution card. Again, there was no option to re-build and I exited without making any changes.

I opened the Storage Manager Configuration dialog. All five drives are shown on the tree with an exclamation mark. Unfortunately, when I select all five drives, the Rebuild button remains disabled.

So, that's where things stand. I have not made any changes, aside from replacing the clicking drive on port 4. The card seems to know that the original four drives (0 - 3) used to be parts of arrays. However, the definition of the array seems to be lost or broken. I am hoping there is a non-destructive way to re-define the array. If anyone can provide some guidance, I will be very grateful.

Why were you using RAID-3?

A double disk failure (which is what you have in effect created) will break a RAID-3 array. The best course of action is probably to contact the manufacturers, but I suspect that you're going to have to restore from a backup.

Tricky. First off, if you can, image all the working drives so that you can then experiment without losing the data. You might find something from www.runtime.org useful, but I suspect the rebuild, if it is possible is going to be time consuming and difficult. If you have backups, it would probably be quicker to restore from those - otherwise a data recovery specialist might be required.

As you say, the card now thinks that it has 4 broken arrays of one drive each, rather than one array of 5 drives. How I don't know - perhaps changing two drives was the cause - but that isn't much help now.