Upgrading Controllers firmware on a degraded RAID 5 array

Hi guys
I have been told that upgrading the controllers firmware on a degraded raid array can cause a loss of configuration. I have been doing this for over 1 year and it has never happened, it sounds more like a myth to me that anything else but i would like some advice on it, if possible.
Is it true that the RAID Configuration can be lost by upgrading the RAID Controller? In theory isnt the RAID configuration kept on the hard drives?
Thanks in advance,
Pedro

No - this is not a myth. It is entirely possible to lose access to the storage either temporarily or permanently.
It is extremely bad practice to upgrade any system with a degraded component no matter how small.
Which particular array have you been upgrading?
In most arrays, the configuration is saved on multiple disks - on some arrays as a n-way mirror where n is the number of disks in the tray. However unless you know exactly what the implications are, it is extremely important that firmware updates are not carried out on degraded arrays.

Similar Messages

XServe Degraded RAID Array

Hello
I have 2 XServe Dual Core servers experincing the same issue.
On initial setup I used 2-500gb modules to create a mirrored drive. Then installed the OS plus the applications that I am running. After a day or so the RAIDS were degraded. I formatted the the degraded drive and the rebuilt the mirror. Upon restart the raid was degraded again. I replaced the drive and the same issue again. I originally thought it was bad hardware on one machine but I am experiencing the same issue on both. Have not only reformatted but have replaced with 3 different drives on BOTH XServes. I even tried removing the Apple drives and replacing them with Seagate 500gb SATA drives off the shelf here without any luck.
Any ideas???
Thanks in advance

Thanks for the Welcome.
I haven't tried the anything with RAM but I will..
The odd part is that it is happening on 2 different machines. I initially created the RAID. Then installed the OS. Then installed my server apps. Everything seemed fine for a few days and then a degraded drive. After a few rebuilds and recreating the RAID. I formated the drives and used the Zero all data option. Rebooted the server and didn't launch any applications just let the serevr run and after one day the raid was degraded. I lso get a degraded RAID if I shut down the server and power it back up.
What I will do today is try installing just the factory RAM in both servers. Format the drives and recreate the RAIDS and see what happens.
I installed 16gb of crucial RAM into one server. And 4gb of Crucial RAM into the other.
I will let you know

Upgrading QT caused my RAID array to drop frames again!

FCP 5.1.4. Upgraded QT today as per software upgrade. Repaired DPs after. Just as last time, now my RAID array drops frames on PB. Last time, I thought it was a controller card problem, but a student said to just reinstall QT using steps from Michael Eilers' March 18, 2007 post. It worked. I can try this again, but my question is: Do I have to do this everytime I upgrade QT? Am I doing something wrong? This can't be the SOP for upgrading QT, can it? Maybe I should look at LaCie for updates to the RAID? Advise and help to answer this would be greatly appreciated.

REPEAT AFTER ME: WHEN YOU HAVE A STABLE OS AND APPLICATION COMBO, CLONE YOUR STARTUP DRIVE. This is the only way, I repeat, THE ONLY WAY to work if you depend on your system for your livelihood. I clone to a second internal drive and I can be back to work in a matter of minutes if things go south after an update or upgrade. There is no way that Apple can thoroughly test every possible hardware and software combination. And do not expect a third party supplier to have updates immediately ready.

KT4 Ultra: problem config. raid array IDE3

I owe the MSI 6590 KT4 Ultra BSR mainboard and I have difficulties configurring the RAID array in striping mode, on the IDE3 controller.
The manual describes on page 2-18 it's possible to connect up to 2 hard drives, cdrom, 120mb fd and other devices to the IDE3 controller.
Unfortunately only one of my two MAXTOR D740X-6L (6L080J4) 80gig drives is recognized by the array.
One Maxtor hard drive is jumpered as MASTER and the other is set up as SLAVE.
When I hook up the cable to an ordinary IDE port (eg IDE1) the two drives are properly recognized.
Both drives can be formatted using the regular IDE ports, this means without any cluster errors or other errors so the drives are physically OK.
Before I wrote this post I checked the support section again to make sure I am using the latest BIOS which is 1.1. I also downgraded to 1.0, but that didn't solve my problem either.
Since I work in a computer shop now and then I had the opportunity to check two Maxtor Fireball3 30gig drives on a different MS-6590 RAID board (BIOS 1.1.) and exactly the same problem occurs: the 2nd drive won't be recognized in the ARRAY on IDE3.
Please tell me what to do to make the striping option fully work on my two IDENTICAL Maxtor hard drives since MSI support came up with a standard email, which didn't cheer me up at all. Hopefully this time they will investigate this matter since no doubt more people will experience this.

Thanks for the quick response, though it's not satisfactory for me (of course).
Actually before installing the new KT4 Ultra I owed the KT266 Pro RAID motherboard. It's true this board has two controllers for the RAID option. Nevertheless because after reading the manual of this new board I was convinced I could connect two hard drives on the IDE3-channel. This is the reason I decided to go ahead and to upgrade to this new mainboard.
I guess I have to go back to my employer and fall back again to my KT266 (MS6380).

Ide3 Raid Array

to setup a raid array on ide3 do i connect the 2 drivers on the same cable.
do the drivers need to be set both as master or mast/slave
Please advise
Regards
Enzo

Thanks for the quick response, though it's not satisfactory for me (of course).
Actually before installing the new KT4 Ultra I owed the KT266 Pro RAID motherboard. It's true this board has two controllers for the RAID option. Nevertheless because after reading the manual of this new board I was convinced I could connect two hard drives on the IDE3-channel. This is the reason I decided to go ahead and to upgrade to this new mainboard.
I guess I have to go back to my employer and fall back again to my KT266 (MS6380).

Help with Degraded RAID?

I have a RAID array established (mirrored aka RAID 1 across two external Firewire drives, and it's not being used as my system volume.) The array has been in place for quite some time, and I've recovered from several failures previously (note to self: don't buy any more firewire drives that don't come back on after a power failure.)
I've just recovered from another failure, where the RAID set refused to recognize the existing drive as previously belonging to the set. I re-added the drive to the array and the drive was successfully rebuilt.
So far, so good. So what's the problem? The array is listed as "degraded." I tried following the advice listed here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106987
Executing the command "diskutil checkRAID" reveals the results at the end of this message. What can I do about the duplicate node 2? All of the diskutil commands require the Device Node as a parameter, and they don't recognize "2" or "Unknown" as a valid value.
Help would be much appreciated ...
RAID SETS
Name: Backup
Unique ID: 59256911-7EF5-4FA4-B355-776D8187E8C7
Type: Mirror
Status: Degraded
Device Node: disk2
Apple RAID Version: 2
# Device Node UUID Status
1 disk1s10 536A7B2E-5F78-420E-AD36-98E4F21E01A5 Online
2 disk3s3 3E52C861-2ABF-4446-BAC6-C09DE2E95D86 Online
2 Unknown Missing/Damaged
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, I still don't know what happened originally. Perhaps I recovered the array pre-10.4 and some state was unhappy when I upgraded to Tiger? I'd still like to know the cause, but here's what I did to cure it ...
I backed the whole array up using Disk Utility. Just to be safe.
I used "diskutil destroyRAID" for which the documentation is nothing short of terrifying. I pretty much expected all the volumes to be wiped and to have to restore the whole thing. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the two volumes in the mirror were simply disconnected and both were intact duplicates of one another.
I unmounted one of the two copies, used "diskutil enableRAID mirror" to turn the other one into a single-set RAID and used Disk Utility to add the unmounted disk back into the array and started the rebuild.
All appears to be well again. This was under 10.4.6 so your mileage may vary. When in doubt, back EVERYTHING up first.

One RAID Array Becomes Two???

All:
I have setup a RAID 1 array with two identical segate SATA 150 drives. This was a clean install, and everything went without a hitch. My problem is this: after a week or so, I would boot the PC and The BIOS RAID array would say "Error--Degraded." It took a long time to boot, but was fine and when I got into Windows, my C:\ drive was joined by a D:\drive (the second Seagate.)
I shut down, rebooted, and went into the RAID BIOS. The second drive had magically gained its own array (non-bootable), which I deleted. The PC booted fine with a healthy RAID array, and all was well.
Until it happened again a day later. And again. And again. Basically, the array doesn't stay stable for more than a couple days. I even swapped out the drives with Seagate as they were clicking. The new ones are good, but the problem still occurs.
I have not experienced any data loss, but am mystified as to what is going on here...Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank You,
Michael Tschirret
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum Edition v 1.40
Athlon 64 3200+
1 GB DDR 2700 SDRAM (2 512MB sticks)
2 HDD 160GB|Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Sata 150
1 WD 100GB External IDE hard drive
Sony CD-R/RW DVD +/- R/RW
TDK CD-R/RW
1 Floppy drive
SB Audigy 2 ZS Platinum
eVGA GeForce 6800GT

I'm having the same problem, except I am using 4 hdds in RAID 0+1. one drive dropped out and the machine crawls now. Could it be an issue with SATAI vs SATAII? I have 4 Seagate Barracuda 120GB drives, but they were purchased over a two year period, so I suspect their firmwares vary a bit...
Any help would be much appreciated.
BTW, I have the latest BIOS installed (v1.B)

Is It Possible to Clone RAID Array in a Safe and Easy Way?

Why do computer users need to clone RAID array, especially Windows Server users need to do RAID cloning? Generally speaking, they need to clone RAID array regularly in order to upgrade disk or migrate data from small disk to a larger one. A typical
example is that when the partitions on the hardware RAID runs out of space, you may prefer to rebuild the hardware RAID with larger hard disks. Then, you need to backup the data to another place, rebuild the hardware RAID and restore data again.
What a time-consuming task!
Is it possible to clone RAID array in a safe and easy way? The answer is yes and this article will introduce a RAID cloning software.

Hi jiangchunli,
Were you looking to post this question in some other forum? This looks like related to RAID and Disk upgrades.
This forum is meant for
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/services/recovery-manager/
Please let us know if this is indeed Hyper-V Recovery Manager related so we can help better.
Thanks
Praveen
Praveen/ www.PraveenKumar.in

Raid array being seen as 2 individual drives

Hi. Here is the issue as posted in other places. Still searching for the answer to this one.
Specs:
K7n2 delta2 platinum with b50 bios
2x1gb crucial pc3200 2.5cas ram
AMD Barton 2500
2 x 160gb 7200rpm 8mb cache SATA Samsung Hdd's
Thermaltake 430w psu
Gainward fx5700 ultra graphics
OS's: original xp corp, slipstreamed xp corp sp2
raid drivers: nvraid.sys v4.27, 5.10, 5.11 (also the needed nvatabus.sys with those)
I am NOT overclocked.
fsb 166
1:1 ram/cpu
no spread spectrum or other garbage
ddr400 patch disabled
PSU gives presumably stable reading (according to what I see), with amperage ratings above the required.
checked and rechecked cables for bad ones
ran mulitple scans on drives, all come up drives OK
I HAVE installed into Raid 0 already, this is not an issue of hardware failure as far as I am concerned.
So here is the scenario
I have properly set up the array, using correct bios settings and the raid setup utility, for a raid 0 array of those 2 hdd's listed. When booting into xp, either version, I have used all 3 of the driver sets listed. I have been reinstalling to do some performance tests on different configurations.
Anyway, for the last few nights I have been trying to get the windows setup to see the raid 0 array as one 300gb drive. It does not, no matter what I try. It sees them as 2 drives, each being 160gb (or thereabouts). These drives are matched, same firmware, same lot, so that should not be an issue.
I have used numberous tools to delete the mbr on the drives, both in an array and as single drives. I have done the same as well as tried an install and formatted each drive individually, still the same effect when the raid array is recreated.
Basically, I can find no good reason why the array is seen as individuals and not as an array. It is interesting to note, that even though xp setup sees the the array as 2 drives, I can complete the text based portion of setup. However, rebooting to start the GUI portion of setup, it will not boot. Obviously becuase the bios has the controller as the nvraid controller and it is supposed to be a raid 0 array, so I expected that.
Short of rewriting the mbr, either by deleting it or by changing each drive by formatting/partitioning/installing an OS on them, I cannot think of how to fix this. I know the drives and xp cd's work because I have already installed with them.
I understand what to do in the bios portion, and in the raid setup utility portion. I know that I can boot into windows as a single drive and use the nvraid tool to set it up, but that is not the way it should be, and that is not the way I am going to learn WHY this is happening.
Roger that. First set in bios enable raid (in this bios I have to enable IDE array, then choose which controller to actually enable raid on, which happens to have been SATA 1 & 2).
Second, upon reboot, I use the F10 key to enter raid utility. Then, set to striping, set stripe size (which was one of the things I am testing), and add the drives to the array. Next step is to create it. It asks to clear disc data, and it is done.
Have deleted that array as well as just cleared it. Have deleted it and reboot and rebuild it. Have deleted it, reboot, change bios back to non-raid, reboot. Reboot. Change bios back to raid enabled. Reboot. Rebuild array in raid utility, reboot. Run setup, only see 2 hdd's, not one array.
Umm, yep, that is about it.
More to the story now.
From some other posts I tried this.
1. destroy array. reboot. disable raid in bios. reboot. verify sata's visible as singles in bios.
2. power down. pull plugs on sata's. reboot. no drives visible.
3. pull power. jumper clear cmos. wait 60 seconds. re-pin jumper. power up.
4. verify no drives. verify default bios settings. all is good
5. plug drives in. reboot. seen as singles. erase mbr on both drives. reboot
6. enable raid in bios, and choose sata 1 & 2 as "enabled". reboot.
7. use F10 key to setup raid. Here is the interesting part. Even though I deleted the array prior to all of this, and removed the drives to force an ESCD update, and cleard the cmos with the board jumper, and then before raid was enabled, cleared the mbr on the drives, when I started the raid utility, the array was already set up. That is the problem, whatever that is. I have read snippets where it is claimed that this chip or bios or whatever stores some kind of a table on this stuff, but this is a bit out of hand.
That combination, IMO, should have cleared anything out. But, the saga continues.
Thanks for you help BWM
[Edit] BTW, I have finally found a utility that will see a raid array and allow me to clear the arrays mbr. It is called SuperFdisk and is at ptdd.com. So far the only one that see's the 2 drives as 1.
Yeppers.
Started with v5.10 which came on a floppy with the mobo. Told setup to use both, nvatabus.sys and nvraid.sys. Even switched which one of the 2 I picked first, just to see.
Same thing with v4.27 and v5.11. Also tried it with just the nvraid.sys and just the nvatabus.sys (which obviously does squat for raid, lol)
Trying some new things now. Post in a little bit.
I am officially at 'Wit's End'.
Here is what I have tried now.
1.pull drive cables. pull power. jumper clear cmos. wait. power up. no drives
2.plug sata 1 in. boot. drive detected.
3.boot to command.com, run MHDD, which is a nice russian utility similar to Spinrite. Used this to clear the mbr at hardware level, and do a complete erase.
4. reboot to command.com. run superfdisk. erase mbr.
5. pull plug on sata 1, and plug in sata 2 with sata 1 cable. repeat the erasure steps listed above.
6. pull plug on sata 2, no sata plugged in. reboot
7. change bios to raid enable on sata 1 & 2. power down
8. plug in sata 1 & 2. power up.
9. inspect raid utility. no listing of any arrays. reboot
10. in raid utility, build array. did NOT clear discs. reboot
11. attempt install. single drives found again (used both drivers).reboot
12. in raid utility, optioned to CLEAR discs (funny, rebuild option is never valid).reboot
13. attempt install, both drivers, still seen as 2 individuals.
Things to note. When creating an array when presumably there are none, it assigns the raid array an ID of 2. Upon reboot, the ID is now 1. Don't know what difference that makes.
Also, tried the install listed above with APIC functionality both off and on. Also, when on, set MPS to both 1.1 and 1.4. In addition to this, each variant I tried manual HAL layers of, in this order, ACPI (the one that actually spells ACPI out), ACPI Uniprocessor, MPS Uniprocessor, and let it choose it for me.
So, here I sit in a barca-lounger at 'Wit's End', with a warm cup of java and a dinner mint.

Here is the final product on the floppy disk that I used to successfully install a stable raid 0 on the MSI K7N2 Delta 2 Ultra 400 Platinum ms-6570e motherboard.
On root of floppy, from driverset 6.70. (after much testing, I used driver pack 5.10 for my nic and smbus. I used the realtek sound drivers off the cd for audio. I have used every driver pack I could find, and while some did offer better I/O or read/write latency, this set in general provided the most stable environment. The only drivers I used were these floppy drivers for SATA, the nic and smbus just mentioned, the sound just mentioned, and updating the nvide drivers to mside drivers)
<from sataraid directory>
disk1
idecoi.dll
nvatabus.sys
nvraid.cat
nvraid.inf
nvraid.sys
nvraidco.dll
<from legacy directory>
nvata.cat
nvatabus.inf
I used the txtsetup.oem from the sataraid directory, but edited this:
[Files.scsi.RAIDCLASS]
driver = d1,nvraid.sys,RAIDCLASS
inf = d1,nvraid.inf
dll = d1,nvraidco.dll
catalog = d1,nvraid.cat
[Files.scsi.BUSDRV]
driver = d1,nvatabus.sys,BUSDRV
inf = d1, nvraid.inf
dll = d1,idecoi.dll
catalog = d1, nvraid.cat
To this:
[Files.scsi.RAIDCLASS]
driver = d1,nvraid.sys,RAIDCLASS
inf = d1,nvraid.inf
dll = d1,nvraidco.dll
catalog = d1,nvata.cat
[Files.scsi.BUSDRV]
driver = d1,nvatabus.sys,BUSDRV
inf = d1, nvatabus.inf
dll = d1,idecoi.dll
catalog = d1, nvata.cat
Now, it is important to note that I installed or attempted to install at least 50 times. Bare minimum. I noticed when I use this custom driver disc that in the GUI portion of setup, XP asks me for files from the disc. I tried lot's of different things to alleviate this, and denied some of them.
One thing that really bugged me was that the bios would see my #2 optical, slave on secondary IDE channel. A dvd/rw drive. And I could even start the setup from it. But, once I got about 3/4 through copy file stage on text setup portion, I would hang. Becuase the drive was no longer accessible. Booting from the master would get me to the desktop, but the slave optical was nowhere to be found. Updating the ATA/IDE controller to the ms ide drivers would get it visible, but I kept having issues with stability after I did that.
The most stable method I found was to use my above listing of driver files for the floppy, and when in GUI mode setup asks about NVCOI.DLL, I skipped it, ignored it, and did not let setup install it. That actually got me to the desktop, with access to the slave optical as a "removable drive". It even knew what the hardware was. It just could not access it. On a reboot however, back to not seeing it. This method however did allow me to update the nvide driver with the mside driver with no stability issues. So, for me it was a raving success.
Here are some links regarding the SATA RAID driver workaround:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:jHbX5bNfGx4J:www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t51140.html+nforce2+nvraid.sys+ms+ide&hl=en&client=opera
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=292&Itemid
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:J9UhG2Kd8W4J:www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php%3Ft%3D32751+xp+2+sata+raid+0+seen+as+individual&hl=en&client=opera
Early on one problem I noticed was that in text setup mode of xp installation, there were long pauses that I have never seen before. I noticed that with both ide and sata installs. Also I noticed that when booting there was a really long pause when the xp logo is first seen in a sort of dim state till when it became bright and vivid.
Come to find out that this is a more or less typical scenario. Most instances that I read about were all pointing to the nvide driver. So, I found if I just updated the PATA controller to the standard ms ide driver, that went away and the whole system ran better.
It took awhile to figure out that if you install a driver with the nForce2 chip, you had to uninstall it or you will have issues. Herein was the main problem I encountered with the SATA RAID installs. The nvatabus.sys driver was required for an SATA RAID install. Omitting the ata driver was impossible. And for awhile I had no success updating the ms ide driver once I was to the desktop without major instability. Here are some links regarding the drivers for this chipset:
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/latest-drivers-for-nforce-3-vt60240.html
In my browsing I came across some pretty interesting articles regarding ACPI. One thing I started playing with was the different HAL layers that xp installs on it's own, vs. me picking one manually (F5 key). I must have started the setup at least 50 times to figure out this: that this particular board does not give me the bios settings to install xp with anything but the ACPI Uniprocessor Hal. For instance, the MPS Uniprocessor HAL is much more responsive, but it lacks the IRQ's needed for setup to see the raid array. I booted to each one, some locking the system up, some booting OK. The one I found the best performance with early on was the one that spells out ACPI, not just initialized. (sorry, I don't want to look it up).
I seemed to be getting closer, but I could not find the needed bios settings to properly manage my ACPI, and since I was trying for RAID, I could not use the one that did work. Here is a link for that kind of stuff.
http://www.fceduc.umu.se/~jesruv98/info/acpi/acpi.html
Another thing that I did not like was being forced to use the dynamic overclocking feature of this board. I have a 333mhz barton core, and I have ddr400 ram. In optimized (fool proof) mode in bios, I was running asynchronous. I did not want that. So I set it down to run at 166mhz, with very slow and conservative settings on everything. Unfortunately, if I did this "manual" method, I was forced to use the dynamic overclocking. I thought I had that figured out. So I set everything to "optimized". But, as it turns out, the system had terrible stability without the dynamic overclocking set to at least Private. What this meant is that I could not rule out that my stability issues (corruptions and hangs and bsod) were from being overclocked even a tiny bit or not. And as if that were not enough, this bios has a special set of settings you must unlock to see. And one of those is paramount in achieving a stable system. It is called the DDR400 patch, and it is enabled by default. So, by pressing SHIFT+f2 AND CTRL+F3, these settings are now available. Like I said, I had to disable that DDR400 patch setting.
I also found out from the first day that my board shipped with the latest bios. I flashed the 2 prior versions with no success in more stability. After about 6 weeks of getting whipped on by this board, I found mention of some modded bios's for this board. I have used modded bios's in the past, some worked wonders, others required some serious effort to recover from. What I found out about this board is that there are 2 players who make the modded bios's. Here is the first index I found from a german website. This one actually is for the older B4 version only for the Platinum.
http://storage-raid-forum.de/viewtopic.php?t=2824
And here is an english forum for pretty much the same thing
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/bios-mods-for-k7n-and-k8-boards-vt55014.html
These links have a bit more information, and I decided to go with these. I tried versions b61,b62 and b71. I found b71 to work the best for me. Mind you I am not into overclocking or what-have-you. Just a rig that performs as well as it was advertised to do. Try these out for the bios information:
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=385480
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=84715.0B62
Here is a page that had a bunch of misc stuff I found interesting:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:QkvLeKcbwjQJ:www.amdzone.com/modules.php%3Fop%3Dmodload%26name%3DPNphpBB2%26file%3Dviewtopic%26p%3D75383+nforce2+ultra+nvraid+driver+freeze&hl=en&client=opera
In the end, I have, I think, conquered this board. My findings can be summed up as follows, all in my opion only I guess.
1. There are some ACPI/APIC issues with this board or this chipset. I believe it also included drivers and some can be attributed to XP.
2. There are some major bios issues with this board.
3. There are some major driver issues concerning SATA/RAID. I am not sure who get's the boob prize, nVidia or MSI.
The only way I have found to get RAID 0 installed and stable is to modify my bios (which is a modded beta version), modify my driver disk for SATA/RAID, modify my install sequence for those drivers, modify my drivers within windows after setup, use different drivers from different driver packs for different pieces of hardware, and modify my HAL layer after everything else is done, to achieve peak performance.
If I had not spent soooo much time trying to get a stable install, I would have built up an Unattended CD, which has some possibilities for forcing non WHQL drivers. But, hey man, I am totally burn out on this board. And all it was for is a spare LAN box for when I go to a lanparty. Sheesh. Murphy's law.
Oh, and I also found out, with my own eyes, that the Soyo KT600 Dragon+ that I dumped for this wonderful board, is way faster. Faster read/writes, faster throughput on the nic, faster booting, much faster installs of xp. As a matter of fact, I could get my KT600 to get a consistent thruput on the network to my older KT266a board at 99%. That is pretty fast. 2 of these Platinum boards, on a sweet switch that is tweaked, will only go up to 91%, no matter how much I tweak them. The gigabit connects via a crossover cable at about 38% of full bore. This is tweaked stuff, but still. I listened to the hype. Dual channel memory, giglan, etc etc.
I hope this may help anyone else out there who is still fighting with these issues.
Out.
sul

RAID Arrays and WinXP Home

OK... I tried upgrading to Win XP 64-bit, but found there were games and applications that were screwy there and some items without 64-bit drivers, etc. So, I rolled back to a clean install of XP Home (32-bit).
After much effort, I was told today at a local techie-store that XP Home "doesn't allow for RAID arrays."
True?
I have 2 Hitachi 160GB drives I got last week at the afore-mentioned store for $112 US total! So, I am trying to make it all work, but am having no luck.
Any thoughts?
Scott in Los Angeles

There is a way to make some versions of windows do a software RAID, but the MSI board has a VIA and a Promise hardware array. Don't worry about what the 'techie' said.
Enable Promise controller in BIOS and set it for RAID.
Press Ctrl & F when prompted to set up your RAID array.
Boot to Windows CD
Press F6 when prompted and insert your Promise RAID disk.
Enjoy!

Updating a Hardware RAID array

I'm running a recent Mac Pro model with Hardware RAID and four 1TB SATA drives.
Seagate 1.5TB drives are now available, and they're cheaper than the 1TB drives were just a few months ago.
My Infrant/Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ implements a proprietary form of RAID that they called X-RAID, similar to RAID-5 but with the feature that you can swap larger drives into the array one at a time, and when you're done, the RAID will be re-synced to make use of the additional storage without requiring that you dump and restore the contents of the array. The final re-sync is an admittedly long process (it took three days for mine to update from 4x750GB to 4x1TB) but it's still a very convenient feature.
Does Hardware RAID on Mac OS X have anything like this, i.e. can I replace 1TB drives one at a time with 1.5TB drives and preserve my data? And when I'm done, will the system recognize and use the new storage?
If not, could someone please describe the procedure that I would need to go through in order to achieve this? I presume that I would need to recreate the RAID array entirely, re-install the OS, and then restore the system from my Time Machine backup. But I'm not sure of the details.
I'd appreciate any help with this. Thanks.
An aside: I was more than a little upset a few months ago when I called Apple Support for help with initial setup of my RAID array (I have Apple Care) and was told "Sorry, we don't support Hardware RAID." So Apple was quite happy to sell me an $800 piece of hardware for my lavish new system but didn't bother to tell me at time of purchase that my configuration was "unsupported." It seems a little outrageous to me.
Given Apple's refusal to help me I need to ask the community for help with problems like this.

Hi rrgomes;
Never having heard of X-RAID but going by your comment that is similar to RAID5 I would have to say that you will not be able to upgrade by replacing one disk at a time.
As to no support for the RAID card, I personally would not have taken his word for that. Instead I would have escalated it up through Customer Service just to be sure before I gave up on that point. To me the response you got there sounds bogus.
Allan

Alert for failed disc in RAID array

is there a third party software that will alert when a disc in a raid array is degraded or failed? right now, i have to open raid utility to see this. i would like to get a small alert so i can replace the disc quickly.
any ideas welcome.
thanks

SoftRAID http://www.softraid.com
I think there is something like <aa href=http://www.macupdate.com/search.php?arch=all&keywords=RAID&os=macosx> "RAID monitor"
( not rocket science )
Search http://www.macupdate.com
(as well as the usually news, tip, sites) on reports of how well it WORKS and for sending email alerts etc even.
There should be entries in system log of repeated I/O requests and failures, and look for attempts to reassign bad blocks as well.

Storage 3310 RAID array as JBOD

Hi,
I have Storage 3310 RAID array. I want to use it as JBOD, half of the disks connected to
one controller channel, the other half to other controller channel.
I connected cables as it's is shown on FIGURE 4-16 (http://docs.sun.com/source/816-7290-19/ch04_cable.html#pgfId-999796)
but without expansion unit and with one host.
Seems that's not ok since disks are not recognize by format command.
There was RAID 5 was configured. I erased it. What should be configured at storage?
Thanks
Mario

AFAIK that's not the question. The question is can we convert (from a H/W standpoint) a RAID array to JBOD. And the answer is no.
You can use NRAID, but this remains a 3310 RAID array. BTW, please have a look at http://dlc.sun.com/pdf/817-3711-17/817-3711-17.pdf page 100:
"Note NRAID does not provide data redundancy. The NRAID option that appears
in some firmware menus is no longer used and is not recommended. "
Nicolas

Windows Vista + nVidia i680 MB + RAID5 + iTunes 7.3.2 = RAID array trouble

Dunno if any of you can help out with this but I'm at witt's end over this issue.
I have a Windows Vista box running an Abit In9-32MAX motherboard (nVidia i680 chipset), four drives in a RAID 5 array and using iTunes 7.3.2
Drivers for the motherboard are the most recent ones from the nVidia site. BIOS for motherboard is also current.
Practically ANY time I import any audio or video file over 50 MB into iTunes the entire RAID array will degrade. I'm also having issues transcoding video into Quicktime using Videora which seems to be related to this issue. The video simply refuses to play.
For what it's worth the video/audio content is legit. I own the DVD's that I'm transcoding so I can watch them when I travel.
Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, etc appreciated. I'd love to go a whole week without iTunes/Quicktime forcing me to rebuild the RAID array.

Well, whatever Itunes/quicktime does, it's definitely causing some sort of RAID compatibility. I've had this problem since I got my new rig a month ago. Nvidia 680i SLI board with a RAID 1, and I have it working fine (I've done 3 system restores now) and then I install itunes, and kablooie, there goes the RAID. I can also tell you that even if you disable the mediashield program (NVRAID.exe), it will still happen (this was my last experiment in trying to make it work) and the raid will show up degraded in the BIOS.
Basically, Apple and Nvidia need to exchange a freaking phone call and try and figure out what is causing it to go bad. from reading around, it's not just apple (though they are the biggest culprit). I've seen people mention bittorrent and some other program whose name escapes me at the moment cause this as well (digital imaging program I think).

How do i monitor the health of my Raid array?

First, I want to thank Harm, Bill, and all the countless others who continue to give great advice on this forum. My question is how to I monitor the health of my raid array and how to determine which disk is acting up. I am using a 3-disk soft raid 0 off my motherboard (gigabyte ud3p). Seems to work pretty well but occasionally has a hiccup in certain programs. I wonder if it is a sign of an impending problem or if it is just because it is a soft raid. I've tried several HD diagnostics (Crystal Disk Info, Active@, HD Tune, etc.) but aside from temperature, they don't give any info about the impending death of my raid 0. I have the SMART feature turned on in bios.
To premtively address the critics about the raid 0. I only do about one video a week and do a backup every night. So i figured it (and when) it crashes, i'll just lose a days work. The motherboard is suppose to do a raid 5 but it performed really poorly. My system is configured with additional drives (SSD boot, Raid 0 scratch, and final video) as recommended. Any advice would be appreciated.
michael

The problem with almost all raid controllers is that they do not support SMART. So that is out. With software raids you are even more limited.
With hardware raid controllers you have web based interfaces that show some basic information, like this:
but software raids do not. There are two ways to determine possible problems, at least that I know of:
1. Use drive cages with LED's for the individual drives to show activity and inspect them visually.
2. Use old-fashioned manual labour to feel vibrations, temperatures and hear clicks on individual drives.
With only 3 drives in the raid, the chances of guessing correctly are 33.3% to start with and they only increase with manual inspection. A far easier job than in the case of 6 or more disks.
Sorry I can not offer better suggestions.

Upgrading Controllers firmware on a degraded RAID 5 array

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