Degraded RAID set

Hi All,
Dual Core 2.0 running 10.4.2. I set up a raid set and one of the drives almost immediately reported a SMART failure. So I replaced it. No problem, no downtime, even. The machine functioned fine with just the one drive.
Now...
Bought a replacement second drive. Added it to the RAID set, rebuilt it. No problem, but the RAID set still reports as degraded. I cannot delete the damaged drive because I don't have it anymore (hindsight is 20/20). How can I delete the non-existent drive?
Thanks,
Danny
Dualcore 2.0 G5 Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Yeah, but if you've only got 2 slices and one of them
is out to lunch, well, it's not rocket science to
know what your risk is ...
Well, actually, one failed and has been replaced. It was pretty easy to add the new drive to the RAID set (just drag and drop into the RAID and then rebuild it). The machine worked ave without the failed drive hence...
What worries me is that I don't know for sure
if the RAID array is actually working as designed and
I haven't found a definitive statement about what
exactly 'degraded status' means. Does it mean
'not working as well as it should but still doing the
job' or does it mean 'this RAID array isn't doing
diddly and sometime soon you're gonna be up the
creek.'
As you could see, the RAID was working very well. One drive died and the machine continued working fine, so there was NO downtime (except to switch off the G5 and yank out the failed drive). I'm guessing degraded means that one of the registered slices is missing. But if you have another registered slice, then you're fine.
More specifically, if my primary drive actually does
die, is there a complete dupe on the second drive in
the array or not?
As in my example, that's exactly right. The hard drives are exact copies.
I guess I should go ahead and do a hard backup on an
external drive and then just pull out the primary
drive (it's hot-swappable) and see what happens.
Yes, RAID is not back-up. If you have a corrupted directory structure due to software, then you would have to rely on a back-up. But it's nice to have both, really, as the most common problem with disks is hardware failure and this minimizes problems involved.
To tell you the truth, though, I'm not sure I'd bother again. I find that using psync (available from bombich.com under the Carbon Copy cloner section) works fine. It creates a fully working system disk and can be set to clone the start-up drive daily. If the main disk fails, most people won't even notice that they're starting up from the second one.
So back to the question: how to remove this degraded status?

Similar Messages

Degraded RAID set (mirror)

I am running a pair of 2 GB external drives in RAID 1 (mirroring) using the OSX Disk Utility. Recently I noticed that the set shows it's RAID status as Degraded and one of the two drives is indicated as "Missing," which keeps the "rebuild raid set" button grey. However, I can verify each of them separately and they appear to be okay. Only one of the drives appears to be partitioned correctly; the "missing" drive simply shows a RAID slice for the entire 2 GB.
I would recreate the mirror set, except that I don't have anywhere to store the 1.3 GB still on the good drive, and I believe I cannot create the set again without erasing the contents. (I back up to the RAID set as well as use it for un-backed up storage, which I think is safe as long as the RAID set is working.)
Any ideas how to get the "missing drive" to reappear, so the system can rebuild the set? Or any other ideas to get out of this problem? Thanks.

It doesn't change the problem, but obviously I meant TB (not GB)

Degraded RAID set help

Hello Support Community,
I have a 4 bay RAID set that all of a sudden is showing as degraded. I have two pairs of disks each striped, and then have those two pairs mirrored. Not sure if this is a correct RAID format, but it is what it is right now. So both striped sets say online, with no problems, but my mirrored set of those two pairs shows that it is degraded. See below.
Any thoughts as to what might be happening? I have the options set to automatically rebuild the RAID. How do I know this is happening? How long should I expect this to take? It's a 4TB raid in it's current config, and there is about 3.7TB of data on this RAID. I have everything backed up in two other locations. Am I better off starting from scratch? Or should I just let this thing run for 2 weeks and see what happens? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Dave

No, I was doing all of this in disk utility. I left the arrary running overnight, and it's back online now. Not sure what got screwed up.
Thanks

Degraded raid set now missing

I have or should I say had 2 250GB mirrored raid set. They would no longer boot I bought a new drive (same size) and attempted to rebuild the set. This went fine for a time but then failed. Now I can no longer see the raidset. I have tried booting from the server CD and it will stay booted just long enought to show me the raid set is gone or to open terminal then it shuts itself down.
I desperately need the data on this server. My most recent backup to tape was the end of January.
G5 Server Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Both hard drives were ruined by a power surge.

Suggestion for fixing broken raid set

Jesus. Again. Twice in 6 months. Raid set failure.
2:58pm today : Drive 3:50014ee2aede46eb missing - Previous drive status was inuse
2:59pm today : Degraded RAID set RS1
2:59pm today : Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
Jesus...
After launching the Raid Utility, I notice that one drive is actually missing from the drive bays.. Its just gone, and I have not done anything to it. This happened last December as well. Hard booting the drive (pull out, push back in) worked last time to get the drive online, but jesus. Twice? I should maybe replace the drive? I am using Apple Raid Card, people say it turns to be pretty strict about the drives state, but why the **** it keeps disappearing from the system?!
I was already on the phone with one Apple consultant about this, and I think everything is pretty OK. I have good backups, and gladly, the OS RAID set is ok. Only our accounts and work files were in there, and all is secured. But this is really stressful.. Feels like I can't trust these drives one bit. And they are good drives, standard hardware what comes with Mac Pro.
Just when I was starting to think that everything is finally working smoothly..
Any recommendations about how to act now. I know what I have to do but, it would be encouraging if I would get some steps to how to fix it. Working order etc.
Everything works tho, taking one separate set of backups at the moment just in case. I just need to get my act together and fix it. God I am annoyed tho.
Good weekend to everyone tho. Comments are appreciated.

Yeah, I already ordered a new drive.
I can't do any tests for the bad drive cos it just disappeared from the system totally. I guess it could come online if I hard boot it again (like when the raid set broke last december), but I don't feel like doing it before I get the new drive. Need to analyze it on another computer.
The consultant I talked with earlier mentioned that the RAID card is pretty strict about the condition of the drive. But I would like to know if that is why the drive keeps disappearing, if it really totally ejects it from the system . I heard that some cases the the Raid Utility just shows the red light what indicates the drive state if there is a problem, but for me the drive is just gone totally.
Hope that the new drive arrives soon. Will the Raid rebuild itself if I insert the new drive and mark it as global spare ? That's what I understood from reading the Raid Utility manual.

Need help with RAID Card and degraded Raid-5 errors

Dear all,
I recently purchased a used Apple RAID card for my 2008 Mac Pro 8-Core. The installation went smooth, the card was immediately recognized and the battery reconditioned within one night.
So I started setting up a Raid Set with the 4 identical drives which I already used before as a software Raid. But each time the Raid Level-5 Volume is created, somewhat later the status turns red and the Raid is listed as "degraded"!
A closer look at log reveals:
+19:42:54 Drive carrier 00:01 inserted+
+19:42:27 Background task aborted: Task=Init,Scope=DRVGRP,Group=RS1+
+19:42:27 Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild+
+19:42:26 Degraded RAID set RS1+
+19:42:22 Drive carrier 00:01 removed+
+15:10:57 Created volume “R1V1” on RAID set “RS1”+
So it seems that the drive from Bay 1 somehow gets lost (removed) a few hours after the volume is being created and anysoon later it's being "reinserted"...
Of course, the drive is NOT removed, nobody touched the Mac Pro! Also I did the same procedure 3 times and the result was always the same.
I also tried setting up JBOD and different RAID levels which do all work without a problem. Only when choosing RAID5 (what I intentionally bought the card for), the problem reappears
Anyone any solution or hint for me concerning this problem? Many thanks in advance!

One drive completely broke down later. Replaced that drive and since the problem's gone!

Why a Apple RAID controller card cannot delete a RAID set?

Hi,
I just have a problem with my RAID set created with RAID Utility. My configuration is as follows:
     Mac Pro (early 2009 model) 2 x 2.66GHx Quad-Core, 16GB DDR3 1066Mhz Memory
     Apple RAID Card (HW Ver 2.00 and FW Ver E-1.3.20)
     1 x 1TB HD (Apple original) in Bay 1 as boot disk configured as Enhanced JBOD
     3 x 2TB HD (WD black series RE) in Bay 2 to Bay 4 configured as RAID 5
     Mac OS 10.7.4
The RAID Utility showed the following messages:
Degraded RAID set RS2 - No spare available for rebuild
Degraded RAID set RS2 - No spare available for rebuild
Degraded RAID set RS2
Drive 3:50014ee20352f5e8 missing - Previous drive status was inuse
Drive 3:50014ee20352f5e8 failure detected - Primary disk port unusable, previous drive status was inuse
Furthermore, RAID Utility shows:
1) Bay 1 (RS1 boot drive): Assigned, verified, Status good. viable (good)
2) Bay 2 (RS2 RAID 5): Assigned, verified, Status good, viable (degraded)
3) Bay 3 (RS2 RAID 5): Roaming, verified, Status good
4) Bay 4 (RS2 RAID 5): Assigned, verified, Status good, viable (degraded)
It also showed "Severe Events" message: "Degraded RAID set RS2 - No spare available for rebuild."
I tried to delete the RAID set using Apple RAID Utility but nothing happened. Can anyone help as I have to rebuild the RAID set from scratch? Thanks.

Hi flognoth,
flognoth wrote:
I have swapped the drives in bays and it is always bay 2. I'm coming to the conclusion that either the RAID card is failing in bay 2 or there is a Lion / Mountain Lion issue with the RAID card.
I would say this is not "a Lion / Mountain Lion issue with the RAID card", as I have an "Early 2009 Mac Pro" that is running Snow Leopard (10.6.8), fully patched, that is exhibiting a similar issue, after about 4 years of no such problems.
My RAID configuration is just like yours: 4x 2TB drives, with Bays 1 & 2 as RAID 1 and Bays 3 & 4 also as RAID 1. I keep losing either Bay 1 or Bay 2 disk, and after reboot typically see it as a good disk, in the green, but now unassigned to a RAID set, and marked as "Roaming". When I assign it as a spare, so far the RS1 RAID Set begins to rebuild, and things are okay for a short while.
Initially this happened about once a month, starting about 3 months ago, now it is a weekly or several times weekly event.
I've put in new disks (several), restored from a Time Machine backup, and just came in today to find the Bay 2 disk "Roaming".....
I'm going to try a new Mac Pro RAID card, as I have a spare - just looking for information about whether the replacement RAID card will pick up the RAID sets from info cached on the disks (I hope!), or whether I have to newly create the RAID Sets & Volumes, and then re-populate from Time Machine / the old disks.
I will say that I've been running 8 "Early 2008 Mac Pro" computers with RAID cards, each configured as above, and 4 "Early 2009 Mac Pro" computers similarly configured. These were all deployed between late 2008 and the beginning of 2010. I've had little difficulty with them, and they've been wonderful when an actual disk failure has occurred. I've had about 6 actual disk failures among all these setups.
cheers!

Offline Disc In Degraded Mirrored RAID Set

I have a 2 disc (300GB each) mirrored RAID set that has worked fine up until recently. One slice appeared failed so I attempted to rebuild it. 7 hours later it still showed up as failed. I attempted a rebuild once more and the same result. I then shut everything down and re-booted my whole system. Now the RAID set is still degraded but the slice now shows up as offline as opposed to failed.
I checked the connections and it's all connected fine.
I have run First Aid several times and no repairs were necessary.
Anyway I can get this back 'online'?
If not, can I delete it, repair it and if it's repaired add it back to the RAID set?

It sounds like one of the drives in the mirrored set has lost its mind (i.e., failed).
This is exactly the situation Mirrored RAID is good for.
Remove the failed drive, insert your spare drive of the same or larger size, and assign it as a spare. Then you should be able to get the RAID to rebuild onto the spare and bring it up to date in the next half-a-day or so. Then the mirror will show as working again.
Make sure your Backup is up-to-date. A second failure now (before the array has rebuilt) will give you data loss.

Mirrored RAID set has degraded following power outage.

Hello,
Following a recent power outage our Mac Pro running Leopard OSX Server with 2 x 1TB discs in a Mirroring RAID configuration (with an installed RAID card) developed a 'severe error' message.
The Raid Set R0-1 has a Viable (degraded) status.
Drive One (or bay 1) is 'Good' and 'Assigned'
Drive Two is 'Good' but with the State - 'Roaming'
Also, the events display describes the failure of a drive 3 (there isn't one) and that the R0-1 is Degraded and no spare is available.
So, we're a little confused.
1. Is the Drive 2 no longer part of the RAID mirror (i.e. Roaming)
OR
2. Something more significant has happened hence the bogus Drive 3 message?
Any suggestions or advice would be much appreciated as always.
Thanks
Steve

Yes. Verification with the GUI tool is the first step. But... hmm, if you are dropping communications with the card, that is not a good sign. Make sure you have a backup and then try a PMU reset on the system. Maybe there is something wacky in the power manager. Then try any/all of these from Terminal to get more information:
raidutil list status
raidutil list eventinfo
raidutil list raidsetinfo
This should provide feedback. If these commands fail, then I fear that the card is not responding. Do you have AppleCare? It might be time to call for a replacement card.
Hope this helps

Advice on RAID Sets, Volume Sets, and RAID Levels of the Volume Sets using an Areca Controller

I have read through a lot of information on disk usage, storage rules for an editing rig, users inquiries/member responses in this forum and I thank each and every one of you – especially Harm.
In building my new workstation, I purchased five (5) WD 1T, 7k, 64M SATAIII hard drives and an Areca RAID card, ARC-1880ix-16-4G, which I plan to use primarily as my media/data disk array. The workstation will use a 128GB SATAIII SSD as the OS/program drive and I will transfer two (2) WD Raptor/10k SATA 70GB drives from my current system for pagefile/scratch/render use. I tentatively plan on using a mobo SATAIII port for the SSD and mobo SATA ports with a software RAID (level 0) for the 10k Raptors.
In reading the Areca Instruction manual, I am now considering exactly how I should configure the 5 physical 1TB drives in terms of RAID Level(s), Volume Sets, and RAID Sets. I must admit that I like the opportunity of allowing for a Dedicated Hot Spare as I am generally distrustful of the MTBF data that drive vendors tout and have the bad experience in the past of losing data from a mal-configured RAID array and a single drive hardware failure (admittedly, my fault!).
In line with the logic that one doesn’t want to perform disk reading while trying to write at the same time (or vice-versa), I am thinking the approach above should work OK in using the mobo disk interface and both software and external hardware RAID controllers without having to create separate RAID level configurations within a Volume Set or further dividing up the physical drives into separate RAID sets. I know in forum messages that Harm noted that he had 17 drives and I could envision a benefit to having separate RAID sets in that situation, but I am not at that point yet.
To some degree I think it might be best to just create one RAID Level on one Volume Set on one RAID Set, but want to solicit thoughts from veteran controller users on their workflows/thoughts in these regards.
Anyone care to share thoughts/perspectives? Thanks
Bill

Thanks for the speedy feedback Harm - I appreciate it.
I was thinking RAID level 3 as well.
Of course, it's always something! I purchased the Caviar Blacks by mistake - which are non-TLER. I will work with EggHead to return the ones I purchased and replace them with RE4 versions as I'm not thrilled about the possibility of the controller declaring the volume/disks degraded unnecessarily and although I have the DOS utility WDTLER where one is supposed to be able to enable/disable TLER on WD drives - I suspect WD is way beyond that now anyway with current builds.
I agree with you about just testing the performance of the options for the raptors - on the mobo and then on the controller. When I benchmark them I'll post the results in case others are curious.
Thanks again....off to EggHead!

Problem Rebuilding RAID set with 10.5?

I have 1 RAID set (mirrored with autorebuild) composed of 2 (identical) HD. I got a message in 10.5 Disk Utility that one disk had failed and that the set was degraded.
I replaced the drive and I am getting an error message during the rebuild "Unrecognized filesystem".
I can still see and access my RAID set (1 slice still ok) so minimal damage here but I don't understand why I am getting this error message when trying to rebuild.
Any idea?
Thanks
setup:
-mirrored raid set
- autorebuild selected
- 2 slices (160Gb, GUI, OS journaled ext)

Hi VK2CPJ,
Today ( I slept on this idea was exhausted from previous day) tried on two blank eide drives in a raid box, no raid built just two independent drives, one set for master the other slave. A couple of observations:
I did not raid because I want one small partition to contain a Leopard boot install from the DVD. The message I received from disk utility was that if I restore that DVD my raid may be unusable(if I did raid). So I did not raid the drives but let them stand as master and slave. I wanted to do a APM on the small "boot" partition to see if my intel and PPC Mac would in fact boot from that restored Leopard DVD boot partition. I used start up pane on both PPC and intel and they would not boot up from that Leopard partition even though the start up pane showed the disk as a startup device. Using the option key booted both Macs. Now I'm not sure if doing this was to procedure because the Apple docs says to use a PPC Mac to do this process. Which I have a difficult time to understand. I'm assuming that the doc says that because APM would be default and assisting the user not to make any option mistake. So currently I'm trying this same procedure using a PPC Mac to test out whether start up pane will boot both Macs. I don't think it will but do think using option within the start up manager will work. If so then does this mean imply that the start up pane has a bug or that user does not require a PPC Mac to do the setup process. Let you know shortly.

Possible to increase the total size of a software raid set?

Hi,
I need to increase the size of a software raid set which is internally in one of the Xserves - originally it had 2x 400G drives.
I've swapped drives into the raid so they are both now 500G drives.
diskutil info drive XX (ie raid set) shows that the raid is still a 400G raid volume as expected.
Question is - can I grow the Raid Total Size to use all the capacity of the member volumes?
I guess the alternative is to remove the drives from the raid, enable raid on one of them and then add the other drive as a member... but this would mean I would have to take the raid offline.
The raid sets are not my system disks.
Any clues?
TIA
Campbell
XServes Mac OS X (10.4.5) 12 Macs & far too many PCs

Thanks for your help.
I rebuilt the array using enableRaid. Worked fine with Raid Volume offline for approx 5 minutes - although I had to degrade the array (and go bare with no mirror) twice in the process.
In case anyone is interested, this is what the process was:
1 Swap into Raid array larger drive (say, disk 2) and let array rebuild
2 Disable file services.
3 removefromraid disk 2 (leave it mounted).
4 Unmount the raid set and eject drives (say, disk 1) Remove drive - it's the only original backup.
5 enableRaid on disk 2
Providing enableRaid is ok -
6 Insert a fresh larger size drive in the place of the removed drive (disk 1)
7 Unmount new drive and addToRaid
8 (Rebuild array). Providing rebuilding ok -
9 Start file services again.
Data, permissions & ACLs were all intact. So now users can fill the rest of the raid up with more MP3s this week <sigh>
Maybe not the best approach but it worked well for me.
XServes Mac OS X (10.4.5) 12 Macs & several hundred too many PCs

Degraded RAID

We have an earlier-generation Xserve RAID, set up to RAID 5, where a drive has failed, and therefore the status is Degraded. The failed drive in question was a 250Gb Hitachi, which seem to be no longer available. Instead I have ordered a 250 Gb WD Caviar Blue PATA.
Should it be as easy as pulling out the dead drive, popping in the new drive and putting it back in position in the RAID? Will the RAID repair itself, including formatting the new drive (assuming the WD is good)?

Hi Tod,
Sorry to reply to a different post, i'm unsure how to privately email, but we are having a RAID issue it hought you might be able to help with.
We currently have an xServe Raid in RAID 50 config with 14 drives (7 each side). One drive went down and we took it out and ordered the part (now running 7 on left and 6 on right) and the RAID data was fine. While trying to configure another RAID for temp usage, I accidentally (here's where everyone shurgs) reformatted the original RAID with all our data (non destructively, not writing anything over it) but of course, i lost the original volume which created the single RAID from across the 14 discs. Help. Do you know of any tools that can find the old volume and restore it for us (no, we hadn't backed up the RAID volume). Right now we're using Virtual Lab to try and restore. But any ideas or help would be MUCH appreciated.
Thanks.

How do I remove one failing hard drive from raid set and replace with new one

Last Friday apparently one of my raid drives started failing.
As I mentioned on this forum I started getting continous beeping.
I was finally able to get the raid working at a degraded level. I ordered a replacement hard drive which is arriving today.
(In the meantime I made twice daily backups of my work.....)
Below was the message I got from the browser based raid software:
Blahblah 09    1000.2GB   RaidSet Member SamSung HD103SJ
Blahblah 10    1000.2GB     Free                 SamSung HD103SJ
Blahblah 11    1000.2GB   RaidSet Member SamSung HD103SJ
Blahblah 12    1000.2GB   RaidSet Member SamSung HD103SJ
(See this earlier thread if you wish!)
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/727867?tstart=0
At one point when I did the checked the browser interface I saw the message Failed and Degraded
As I said, I was able to work over the weekend on the degraded system.
This morning I got the beeping again and did the rescue and now I am running a "full raid" without the notice that one raid was "Free".
In any case, the new hard drive is arriving today.
What steps should I take to incorporate the new drive into the raid system.
I have one OS drive
and 4 tb raid drives.   One needs to be replaced with the new one that I am getting today.
Thanks
Rowby

Harm,
Regarding your comment:
Re: How do I remove one failing hard drive from raid set and replace with new one
Please tell me how to read the serial number from an individual drive rather easily, without un-installing them:
If you select the proper drive to change out, you only need to remove one drive and look at its serial number...
Step 1: Identify bad drive serial number using Areca's tools
Step 2: Turn off the computer
Step 3: Remove what you think is the bad drive based on following your numbered cable method, marked hot-swap bays, whatever
Step 4: Verify that the serial number matches the "bad drive" serial number from step 1; if it does great, proceed; if it does not match, go back to step 3
Step 5: Change out the CORRECT drive - that's the bottom line for this whole procedure
Cheers,
Jim

Rebuilding RAID set takes 2 hrs?

Don't know if this is the right place for my post ...
I have a 160gb Raid set (mirrored, 2 disk 160gb each), automatic rebuild). One disk failed, showing degraded in Disk Utility. After replacing the failed HD with a new one disk utility started to rebuild but it took 2hrs...... Is this normal.
I don't have any experience with RAID set and was wondering if this was normal.
Thanks
F
10.5.1
Powermac G5.
2 160GB external HD mounted as RAID mirrored (Mac OS X journaled extented)

Yes, that's normal -or, at least, not unusual.

Degraded RAID set

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