RAID array death?

[Comdot]

I had a RAID array running (stripe) using 2 new Samsung 250 gig SATA 2 drives, and Nvidia RAID. My mobo is Asus A8N Sli (an old version). See my sig.

The symptoms:

About a week ago I kept getting a little windows message saying something like 'found new drive'. I thought perhaps there was a loose cable and it perhaps kept detaching itself. I now now this isn't the case. Anyway, this message kept coming up and the drive kept disappearing and reappearing, and working fine when it was there.

Then yesterday I was opening up a folder on the drive and it was empty. At first I thought the drive was being slow but then I got another worrying dialog such as this:

http://www.nickgrayson.net/Temp/errors.jpg

I thought "YELP!". Anyway the drive was still visible but every folder I clicked on was empty and I kept getting those messages. I clicked on properties of the drive and Windows is telling me that the SAME amount of data is stored there. So perhaps there is just some problem accessing it and it's not gone. Anyway what's bizarre about the dialogue is I wasn't trying to "write" anything, just view.

A few reboots later and the drive doesn't show at all, and no dialogs. The DOS screen on bootup says it's there and healthy.

Any ideas?

 

[sPlAtOiD]

I havent used Raid for a while but cant you rebuild the raid array. But first what i would try to do is restore all the files on that drive first. You should be able to fine a backup program that will see the files on that drive if it's not toasted completley.

 

[Comdot]

Hehe according to your sig you have almost the same setup as me

Yeah I will look into rebuilding the array. First I'm gonna install Kaspersky to get it to do a full virus check. I've found a couple of worms already using AVG and the whole situation seems very suspicious. Could just be virii.

Get this... earlier today all my web browsers couldn't connect to the internet.... for hours of frustration and reboots. All my games etc COULD. How weird is that!!

I think it was because of this worm: Brontok (computer worm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

...judging by its maliciousness that could have been what killed my array too.

thx

 

[MrCoffee]

If you run stripe you run the risk of complete data loss, a high risk. Lets be clear, when a RAID 0 array gets corrupt all your data is gone and its practically impossible to recover. - However it might not be the RAID structure thats the problem so don't give up hope just yet, might just be that the file system is corrupt for example, you could try scanning for errors and fixing.

If you can't pin point the error yourself i'd recommend rebuilding the array from scratch and seeing if the problem goes away, else it might be a hardware problem.

Edit: You've got worms! Ewww

 

[Peter.Cort]

worms beats crabs.

hopefully it is a virus issue and you don't have to completely reinstall and loose all your data.

 

[Comdot]

Ha ha great avatar peter cort! I couldn't agree with it more.

MrCoffee I reckon today's hard drives are pretty safe in RAID 0. Probably much safer than one hard drive on its own 10 years ago. These things are so much more reliable these days. These are brand new modern drives.

But yes, I will try those things. Thanks.

 

[MetalOwns]

Something happened to my RAID 0 array a few weeks back. One of the drives was no longer in the array. Had to delete it and create a new one, then reinstall Vista. Luckily for me, I had backed up all my stuff just minutes before I tried to reboot, and found that it was all jacked up.

 

[Comdot]

Why didn't you just rebuild it instead of deleting it? I guess you also didn't try recovering the data either as you had it backed up. Most of my own stuff was backed up, but there's a few things that hadn't made it onto DVD yet that I'd like recovered.

 

[MrCoffee]

MrCoffee I reckon today's hard drives are pretty safe in RAID 0. Probably much safer than one hard drive on its own 10 years ago. These things are so much more reliable these days. These are brand new modern drives.

All i'm saying is that if you're running RAID 0 you need to accept the associated risk, and its not sensible to store any data that you mind loosing on a RAID 0 array. Many RAID controllers that people commonly use for RAID 0 on a personal computer are not fully hardware controlled, i.e. there is a driver that needs to be loaded in windows in order for you to be able to read the array. That means if anything goes wrong with your windows install and you can't boot it you've effectively lost your data.

P.S. How can you rebuild a RAID 0 array without loosing your data?

 

[MetalOwns]

Why didn't you just rebuild it instead of deleting it? I guess you also didn't try recovering the data either as you had it backed up. Most of my own stuff was backed up, but there's a few things that hadn't made it onto DVD yet that I'd like recovered.

I had planned to do a reinstall of windows anyway, so it wasn't too big of a deal. Like I said, I had all my stuff backed up already. It just so happened that I got lucky, and it only messed up after I had saved my stuff. I didn't even see a rebuild option to be honest.