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

Similar Messages

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.

Time Machine Server - external firewire 800 RAID array incompatible??

Hi all
I originally posted in the wrong forum... so here I go again...
I have an XServe G5 connected to an 8TB RAID array via firewire 800 (running latest version of leopard server) purchased solely to act as a time machine server for a whole bunch of machines. A lot of money and resources went toward this as this is a vital part of our office. One of the machines is a completely decked out Mac Pro with 4x500GB Hard Drives striped for multimedia processing. (Thats why I need a HUGE backup partition on Time Machine)
Now, this was working for about 4 months. Some computers still see the backup array as a destination, but can't write to it, (just sit there for ever "preparing backup") and one machine successfully is still backing up to it.
But for the majority of the machines, when I try to set the Xserve external raid array as a Time Machine destination for the network, it comes up with a yellow "!" sign and "This disk drive may not support Time Machine over the network. Get more information about compatible drives" with a link that points here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306332
As you can see, that was completely not helpful, and now i'm wondering if I'll still have a job after the boss finds out I've just wasted his several thousands of dollars...
When selecting a backup destination for time machine backups, the array appears, but it always says "Failed" with an "i" next to Latest Backup in the system preferences, with the message "Backup volume cannot be found". Thats not true because i've so much as gone to the effort of actually mounting the dang drive in the finder... so its just not looking hard enough!
Here is some info about the external device:
It looks like a PC tower thing, with 8 firewire 800 ports on the back and 8 internal SATA slots. I purchased 8x1TB drives and inserted them in, and software partitioned them to create a giant striped drive (I understand that this might be a little unstable but its just a backup drive).
I daisy chained the firewire 800 ports on the back to output 2 cables, both going in the back of the xserve. Formatted fine, and works a treat. Except for the silly time machine thing....
I think what I am going to do is completely and utterly start again... go nuts one weekend and erase everything, every computer, every wireless router, everything, and start fresh. Since there have been so many little glitches here and there I just want them dead.
Well, if anyone has a quick fix, i'd appreciated it before the weekend

Hi everyone, Just thought I would give you all an update on how things went.
Lets just say that I got everything working fine... this is what I did.
1. I went through, completely un-raided and formatted the external 8 Bay firewire 800 drive
2. Completely reformatted XServe and reinstalled fresh (Probably not an option for a few, but I had a spare weekend)
3. Completely reformatted all client computers and reset all client accounts (Once again, probably not an option for most)
Essentially, I was starting out with a completely virgin setup and setting up for the first time. I installed the firewire 800 drives, and made them into a RAID again. Then installed Leopard server. Brought all the backed up files across, and when I plugged in the drive in Finder, it asked "Do you want to use this as a time machine backup" to which I said "Yes". It proceeded to create a backup.
When that finished, I went into server preferences, and selected the external as a time machine backup for the network. It worked...
I then went about everything like business as usual, and everything worked great. Still going... for now.
So thanks for all that helped, maybe try completely reinstalling everything and it may work.

Disk utility doesn't show xServe RAID Array

I have a new (to me) xServe RAID box and I'm stuck, the stays lights are green the fiber link light is green on the RAID and not lit on the PCI card but shows up as green in the fiber link section of the settings tool but the RAID array doesn't show up in Disk Utility so I can't format the drives.
I set up the disks as Enhanced JBOD using RAIDadmin and I've deleted and created it a couple of times, I'm just not sure what else I should try, I've read the manual but. Can't find any suggestions of what's going wrong.
Thanks

If you have tried restarting a few times and it still doesn't show up I'm afraid you are gonna have to go back in and check the connections. I know they just slot into the carriage, but possibly it is not in tight. I can only suggest you open it up and check everything thoroughly. If after a thorough check, if it still does not mount you may want to take the hard drive back and swap it. Are you sure it was only a hard drive failure in the first place? I only ask this because WD hard drives have quite a solid reputation.

Remote sync between two RAID arrays

We have two Xserve RAID arrays. One is here in our local office, the other at a remote site which hosts a few of our servers as well. Does anyone have any suggestions for keeping the two synced? I would like to not have to deal with tape backups in the office, but the files being stored here are pretty valuable. I've dealt with this on the Windows side with a tool called Tacit. Essentially that was a Windows box that had proprietary software that would continually update remote Tacit boxes. Anything like that on the Mac side? Possibly free? Would Automator be able to sync me up?
Cheers!

I made a 400.rsync script in /etc/periodic/daily:
#!/bin/sh -
# @(#)daily 8.2 (Berkeley) 1/25/94
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin
log=/var/log/rsync.log.`date -u ''+%y-%m-%d''`
date > $log
mountpoint=`mount | grep '/Volumes/EOFILMsan'`
if [ "X$mountpoint" == "X" ]
then
echo "Oh Oh, Filmsan not yet mounted" >> $log
/bin/mkdir -p /Volumes/EOFILMsan >> $log
/sbin/mount -t acfs EOFILMsan /Volumes/EOFILMsan >> $log
fi
echo "START VIDEOsan" >> $log
rsync -av --delete /Volumes/EOVIDEOsan/ /Volumes/EOFILMsan/EOVIDEOsan >> $log
echo "END VIDEOsan" >> $log
date >> $log

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.

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).

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?

Degraded Raid Repair

How can i repair a degraded raid?
All the instruction i have read seem to require a damaged disk, but my disks are OK...
Name: Data Mirrored
Unique ID: Data Mirrored2e749102dd1e11d8822a000d939c63fc
Type: Mirror
Status: Degraded
Device Node: disk3
# Device Node Status
0 disk2 OK
1 disk1 OK
xserve Mac OS X (10.3.8)

Hi
I have seen this before, dont have an answer why but i can help you fix it.
You need someone to look at the front of the Xserve, notice which drive is active and whcih one is not (blue lights flashing) after you have determined which drive is not being used then just pop it out of the bay, wait a minute or so then pop it back in
Once inserted you will be able to run the disutil repairmirror ....... command to rebuild the RAID
Be very SURE which drive is not being used before doing this.
Ed

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.

Degraded RAID, trying to repair integrity

We pulled a major bonehead move.
We were installing another server in the rack and we didn't have the xServe locked. Me and my employee both popped drives from our xserve at the same time and we degraded the RAID.
Setup: Dual G5 xServe, MegaRaid card, 3x300GB drives in RAID 5
I supressed the urge to immediately panic, especially since the server was idle when it got hosed. I powered down right away and booted of the install cd.
I used megaraid CLI utility to re-flag the drives as optimal and brought the server right back up.
I'm noticing some odd behavior and a bit of corruption, so I assume the RAID consistency is blown, I pretty much expected that to be the case.
The problem is, our backups are crap. I've been fighting with the administration for funding for a proper backup system for nearly a year and I've failed so far. Formatting and a bare-metal restore from tape is not an option.
I'm running: megaraid -chkcon 0 -start
.. and it's taking forever according to -status. The documentation is very lacking about what the parameters actually do so I'm in a bind. I can run the consistency check and have the server down for at least a day but what do I get at the end?
Can or does chkcon repair consistency problems?
Here's my options as far as I know, suggestions?
- Is there a way to repair the consistency of a degraded RAID volume?
- Should I backup what I can and scrub the RAID and then just restore what I can from current data and old crappy backups?
- Sould I try degrading, intentionally, the drives that went off line one at a time then using the megaraid utility to properly return them to online with a megaraid -rebuild pd (pd being physical drive)?
- Should I try the official suggestions for moving RAIDs from server to server? Apparently Apple suggests that you can move a RAID by pulling the drives, moving the card without drives, then booting to install disk and doing megaraid -destroyconfig, then shutdown, then put drives back in, then let card magically rebuild raid from meta. This sounds like trouble to me.
Any suggestions (other than don't leave my xServe unlocked.. especially when working in the rack)?
thanks,
Steven.

I was able to pop in the drives, boot off install DVD, and mark them as on-line. The server came right back up.

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)

WinXP-64 bit corrupts existing RAID array

I've got an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard running Win XP Pro SP2 on two 36 gig SATA Raptors. Everything was working fine, but I wanted to try the 64 bit version of XP. Grabbed an old 80 gig PATA drive and threw that in the case. Unplugged the SATA drives so as not to risk messing with the existing working OS. Installed the latest 1218 x64 beta and it worked well.
The problem was that when I shut down and reconnected my old RAID array, windows wouldn't boot from it. I lost everything and had to rebuild Windows from scratch. So now I know to never unplug the SATA drives
Rebuilt WinXP on the RAID array and then tried rebooting with the PATA drive with the 64 bit OS. Came up with the "drive needs checking" screen, and proceeds to "fix" the RAID array while ignoring my frantic pounding on the Logitech USB keyboard to stop. Rebooted and yes, the new install was nuked. Okay, since it's gone anyway, reboot to the 64 bit OS and make sure it's got the 64 bit RAID drivers installed.
Reinstall WinXP on the RAID array, reboot to the 64 bit OS on the other drive and the same old scandisk comes and nukes it AGAIN!
So now the PATA drive is sitting on the shelf again, unless someone here can suggest what is causing this problem.
System Specs
Athlon64 3500
gig of PQI 3200 at 2-2-2-5 2.6
2x36 gig Raptors on ports 3-4
Plextor PX-716a DVD+_RW
Visiontek X800 Pro.

The first time you re-installed Win 32 on the raid that was a bit drastic. A repair ought to have done the job.
The problem was probably that you disconnected the array but that's where the boot.ini was and that file needed to be modified to add the path to the Win64 install.
Since you took out the array the Win64 install created a new boot.ini on the PATA drive. Even when you tell BIOS to boot off the array, Windows has a bad habit of looking at the IDE channels & using the boot.ini if it finds one there - but the file it found didn't point to the array of course.
So basically if you already have Win32 on the array I would leave that array connected normally when installing Win64 on the PATA drive and all should be well.
I've installed Win64 on the same array as my Win32 install and they co-exist happily. I reckon that's the most efficient way to do it. The main thing is to make separate partitions for Win32, Win64 and data files when you install Win32 in the first place. The two OSs can share the same data files, incuding stuff like email.

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

Problem Installing 817 on Windows 2000 with RAID Array

I am having a problem installing Oracle under windows 2000 which has 2 x 60 GB discs configured in RAID array. When I run the setup program the cursor goes busy for about 10 seconds and returns back to normal and nothing happens !. No errors nothing.
However when I run the Object Manager in the ods_preinstall directory it starts but in the log file I get the following error message:-
02/14/02 09:46:18 : (892) : Error in IO Control call for disk PhysicalDrive0 (Error 21)
02/14/02 09:46:19 : (892) : The count = 28
02/14/02 09:46:19 : (892) : The signature is 0x443aa035
02/14/02 09:46:19 : (892) : Error: First Partition of the disk must be an extended disk
02/14/02 09:46:19 : (892) : Found the partition: 7
Any idea whats happening....? Has anyone seen this before. Do I need to do something special in teh RAID..?
TIA
Martin

Here are some possible solutions:
1. The installation notes state that you must be logged on as Administrator to be able to install 9i. Are you logged on as the Administrator? Being logged on as user01 with Administrator priviledges isn't the same as Administrator.
2. Is the disk full? If I remember my installation correctly, I needed 3 times the size of the files. The documentation will tell you how much space you need.
Hope these two questions help
Regards,
Michael

XServe Degraded RAID Array

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