ATA raid problem with ML330 G3

[Janne Jarvinen]

Hi there

I have a ML 330 G3 which have been working just fine with SBS2003 for a couple of years.
I replaced memory with bigger 1GB dimms recently and it started to go too hot. System fan blowing full speed all too often.
I didn´t had installed HP support pack originally at all and I wanted to get self diagnostic to debug temperature problem. So I first updated system rom to newest available and then installed ATA raid drivers as well system tools.
However, after installation of ATA raid drived from HP.com I can´t find my useer disk drive anymore !
I even downloaded and installed the support pack but neither it helped anything. Only thing achieved is icon on left right corner telling raid is okay. Megaidemon from LSI etc.

See I got set as raid 1 2x 130GB IDE disks reserved for user data while operating systems runs on original 36GB SCSI disk.
On bios tool it said DEGRADED and primary disk were rebuilding.
Okay, I replaced it and it rebuilded and status is now ONLINE for both primary and secondary drive of my raid1 set with 2 disks.
They are on their on IDE cables-
Windows says on compute rmanagement that this drive is offline. It cannot be reactivated, it just doesn´t affect anything if I right click it and try it.

I have counted on that this raid will act as backup for me and now I am going nut if I can´t get my data back ie. get drive visible again. Additionally I don´t think my drive did have any problem in te first place but soem weird software issue due to driver installation.
I don´t know what else I can do. SHould try with another boot disk and fresh windows installation ? I am just a bit worried to cause data losses to raid disks.
Any help appreciated !

BR,
JJ

[Matti_Kurkela]

When you reboot a system that has been running continously for years, it causes some extra strain to the system. That can be enough to cause something that is close to failure to actually fail.

Changing multiple things at once is a risk too: it makes troubleshooting harder if something goes wrong.

Before making any changes to old "uptime king" machines, I usually first reboot them once without making any changes, just to cause any latent problems to reveal themselves.

As both the BIOS and the RAID icon now tell that the RAID is OK, it's possible that your access problem is just Windows being confused about which disk is which.

If the Windows disk management shows the system detects another disk that just happens to have the exact same kind of partitioning as your original RAID1 user disk did, assign it a drive letter so that you can view its contents. You may find that the "new" disk contains the data of your user disk: it just currently does not have a drive letter assigned.

It's possible that the RAID failover has caused the disk to be detected as "new" and the OS has not assigned it a drive letter automatically because the data on the disk indicates the drive already has a drive letter... which conflicts with the drive letter of the "old" user disk. I've seen this happen with some RAID set-ups.

If this is the case, the problem can be fixed by just assigning the correct drive letters to the "new" incarnation of the user disk.

The root cause may have been the fact that you upgraded the RAID driver while the RAID set was in a degraded state (or became degraded while the upgrade was going on).

When you replaced the primary disk of the RAID array, the old secondary disk became the primary disk of the new array. The software/firmware based cheap RAID controllers usually copy the identification of the primary disk as the identifier of the entire set. This minimizes the number of steps when creating a new array, but may cause complications when the "primary" disk fails and the disk roles are re-evaluated.

By the way, RAID is *not* a replacement for back-ups. RAID protects you from HDD mechanical failures _only_. There are threats RAID does not protect you from:
- data corruption caused by user/sysadmin error :-)
- data corruption caused by application malfunction
- unexpected behaviour caused by new updates
- RAID controller/driver faults that may cause data corruption

I'm certain you've learned that now.

MK

[Janne Jarvinen]

Good points indeed.
Actually the system is rebooted about 1-2 times a month due to Windows updates etc.
I am using it as temporary workstation too.
I also agree it is about Windows SBS2003 being confused now.
There is not visible any "new" disks or anything which I could assign drive letter to.
Just this disk with offline status.

I have been so amazed how stable and well designed this system is comapred to many other PC I have had. This is the reason I would not like to get rid off this just for this reason neither waste the data without any further fix attempts...

JJ