Hi,
I currently have Raid 5 setup on a machine of mine,
It appears 2 drives have failed but would like help and confirmation of this.
Dan
Dude if your Raid Manager clearly advise they fail, what are you waiting to replace those drive…
o.O great two drive out of four o.O
Check the SMART status of the drives. It could just be a bug in the fake raid that caused the problem; they are often unreliable.
Hi psusi,
How can I check the SMART without the OS being able to boot?
And fake raid?
Dan
Sure, boot an OS from other media, such as the Ubuntu desktop cd. The Intel Matrix Raid, and pretty much all so called raid integrated into motherboards, are fake hardware raid. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakeraid#Firmware.2Fdriver-based_RAID
Hi psusi,
I booted a live CD of ubuntu, within the disk utility all 4 disks are shown.
Each says “SMART Status: Not Supported”
Dan
Hi psusi,
I have rebooted the server again using the ubuntu live CD.
Now within the Disk Utitltys all drives are showing as healthy
Dan
i have never used raid but i think you can use hard disk sentinel…
i would try this…
if you have another computer without raid, install windows in another disk for example an old one, or create a partition please insert one disk and the disks from the raid as secundary disks… i think you should see one by one the smart and the bad sector count…
if the drives are healthy as you say… maybe one of the drives at least entered in error correction mode or something and failed in the array but could recover the info…
Hi David,
Ive been running a self-test on ubuntu for the last few hours, nearly finished on the second hard drive what was reported by raid as failed.
Both are currently showing as healthy and no bad sectors.
How would i go about recovering my system?
Dan
strange… it seems that your drives are ok… if i were you in that situation i would rebiuld the array
Hi David,
Any advice on how to rebuild it?
Ive never had to do this before, most ive ever done is just swapped a drive over.
Dan
Yep, sounds like the Intel fakeraid software screwed the pooch. Have you tried the rebuild option in the bios setup screen? Otherwise, you’re probably going to have to blow it away and restore from backup.
By the way, you can have all of the drives run the smart self test at the same time.
Hi psusi,
I can’t see anything in the BIOS about rebuilding raid.
Nor within the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, only options i see is
-
Create Raid Volume
-
Delete Raid Volume
-
Reset Disks to Non-raid
-
Recovery Volume Options
-
Exit
I have no back, my backup plan was raid haha 
Dan
Just rebooted to the live cd again and once again it saying SMART is not supported :S
Dan
Do you think these hard drives are safe to use?
The only thing i can think of doing is breaking the raid and recreating it.
That way I will lose everything on it though 
Also would it be better for me to get a proper raid?
such as a 3ware 9650, i think thats proper raid?
What is a nice cheap solution for decent raid (5)?
Dan
Hi,
Ive done a long smart test on all now.
the one that raid reports as a offline member passes SMART but has the following.
Raw_Read_Error_Rate = 1
Multi_Zone_Error_Rate = 2
Thats the only thing i can see from them all, im not 100% sure what im looking for to be honest
Dan
RAID redundancy is to avoid downtime while restoring from backup, it is not a substitute for backup.
