anyone familiar with RAID 1?

[directhex]

i've plugged together a bunch of disks in my server for RAID 1

the first array is fine & happy, a pair of western digital 80gb special editions

the second one gets to about 2% mirrored then throws up an error & drops the destination drive from the array

Set 1 dropped member 0 on adapter 0 due to a SCSI error. SRB status was Error With Bus Status.

i've tried swapping the IDE cable for a new one, still gets to about 2% mirrored then drops the drive.

any ideas? if it's a rma job, i wanna get it done asap...

[Steve]

Well either the drive is having a paddy and the controller on it is flaking out, or you have a problem with your IDE/RAID channel.

Test the drive as a standalone.

[directhex]

bleh. better try to back up all my stuff from the one working drive in the array. think recreating the array from within the raid bios rather than the windows utility would help?

[Steve]

It's worth a shot.

[directhex]

nothing whatsoever flagged on a surface scan

am gonna rebuild the array from within the raid bios now, from scratch

[directhex]

both sets are showing as "current" in SilCfg, am doing a full format of the array now. fingers crossed.

[directhex]

crap. dropped again. same error - though with the other drive this time. hrmm.....

think the fact that it's a cheap ass controller means it's having difficultry coping with being filled with drives? could pay another twenty quid for another controller...

[directhex]

ok, i've moved the drives around inside the case, regular flat ribbon cables (no rounding nonsense). if it drops AGAIN, then i don't know WHAT i'm gonna do

[directhex]

well then. it's going at ten times the speed it was before, and it at 18% with no problems yet.

remember kids, ribbon cables are meant to be FLAT

[directhex]

nope, it does. however, re-reading my logs, seems to drop a drive exactly one hour after boot/building. if i'm right, it'll drop again at 4AM. and if so, i've downloaded a replacement BIOS for my RAID controller. hope that works :x

[directhex]

yep, 3:43 exactly, it dropped the array, 1 hour after the raid utility first started logging that boot

"bleh"

[directhex]

tried flashing on a new RAID BIOS, all seemed fineexcept now i can't boot from any drive (cd, floppy) if the raid controller has drives plugged into it.

:|

[Agent]

What board is this ? (or controler card if its not on board ?)

[malfunction]

Perhaps something in windows (or the BIOS) is trying to power down the drive because it thinks it's idle... A long shot but it's a thought.

[malfunction]

tried flashing on a new RAID BIOS, all seemed fineexcept now i can't boot from any drive (cd, floppy) if the raid controller has drives plugged into it.

:|

Or perhaps a conflict with the onboard controller... What are you running it on? I can't imagine a modern board and OS causing problems but you never know.

[Barakka]

Is it an on-board controller, or a card ?

Either way what make/model is it ?

Somebody correct me if i'm wrong but the cheap or on-board IDE RAID controllers i've used only support one array at once. I know with my server it has a RAID 1 array defined and if I put a third drive in it will become a hot-spare all other options won't work. Pretty sure the controller on my MSI board will only support one array at once as well.... also how are the drives set (Master/Slave) ?