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Emergency: Help please – Raid striping problem…
So I have a film that was 98% finished and the director took it for screening on a DVD for a month or two. I had the media on a 4 terabyte software raid that I built with an external enclosure, x4 1 terabyte WD SATA drives with a Sonnet Tempo E4i card. Well I started another film that I needed to use the Sonnet tempo card with (used an identical enclosure with 2 terabyte WD drives but not in a raid) and then I had to hook back up the software raid enclosure today to do the final changes on the first film. The drive worked fine while making the final changes throughout the film but when the director and I came back from lunch to watch the film for the final time through,FCP freaked out and said I had removed media without ejecting it. It turns out one of the 4, 1 terabyte drives seemed to have become corrupted but I think this is because I might not have hooked up the SATA cables up in the exact same order to the back of my enclosure not knowing this was an issue, so the raid stripe became corrupt but it took a little while since I was able to work on the raid drive for the entire morning. This is all I can deduce because the drive itself doesn’t seem dead. I have backups of all the media files but there’s TONS of photoshop pictures I created, songs and downloaded broll that was only on my RAID. I’m assuming that the data is still intact on all four drives but it seems like my raid became corrupt. Is there anyway to rebuild a raid with data that’s already on there? I’m trying out a program called “boomerang” now but I’m not sure how it could even help me and it takes 6 hours just to scan one of the drives. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated…
G5 2.3 dual core
3.5 gigs of ram
osx 10.4.11
FCP 6 -
7 Replies
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1st question: what type of Raid? 1, 5, 0?
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Bryan- Are you sure it was FCP saying that you,”removed media without ejecting it.” Or was it the Mac operating system? That looks like a Mac OS dialog box you get when you inadvertently shut down or disconnect a sata drive without ejecting it first (dragging it to the trash).
Have you used the Mac Disc Utility to check out your raid? It will tell you which drives and software raids are functioning properly and give you options on what to do. The first thing I do when I see that dialog box is quit out of FCP and shut down the computer and the raid. Then I reset all my SATA cable connections. Our raid card doesn’t care which cable is connected to which drive. I boot up the raid then the computer and hopefully the raid has returned to desktop.
Obviously, if you are raid 0 and a drive has died the prognosis is not good.
HTH,
JerryG5 Dual 3GB Ram
FCP5 Studio
External 1 TB SATA Raid 0
Kona LH, Second system w AJA ioLA
Sony Z-1 -
I’m sorry, I skipped over some critical info there in my panic…
RAID 0, and I already tried rebooting, tried drive order and cable order but one drive seems to have failed. And yes I meant that it was OSX telling me there was a problem. The big question then is… does drive order matter in a software raid stripe or did one of my drives just fail on me? Thanks guys…
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[Bryan R] “The big question then is… does drive order matter”
No, not with most controller cards. Before you freak out, do you have Disk Warrior?
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Yes. I’ve been trying to get “boomerang” to work which said I needed to reformat the drives into a new raid (all four drives are working now so I think a little data just got corrupted for whatever reason on that one drive and it freaked out the stripe) since you have to have a functioning raid showing up to access the data spread across but that program has been crashing and the only files I’ve gotten are badly distorted video files…
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Bryan,
I don’t know where you heard about Boomerang or anything about it, it may be terrific, but typically traditional data recovery software should be a last ditch type of thing when working media drives or raids mysteriously start doing strange things as in your case. Traditional data recovery of large media files usually ends up with files that simply don’t play.
Disk Warrior has pretty much become the standard for fixing corrupted drives, somehow magically restoring working devices by fixing directory structures that no other software can deal with. In any case, I hope you are able to quickly recify the issues you’re having.
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Thanks for your help David. Well Boomerang would start to recover some files and then crash and the files it did get were badly corrupted and once I had followed their instructions to reformat the Raid there was no way to run Disk Utility so faced with spending more time in vain to get the work back, I decided to just start over so I can at least spend today relinking and recreating sound files etc. and moving forward trying to get this thing up and running again so I can move on to my other film waiting in the wings before those clients get angry… it’s really painful though. Well lesson learned about Disk Warrior and making backups not only of the video media but of all the media and work that comes with those little still images, icons, sfx and music files I imported and tweaked over all those months…
I seldom have drive issues or technical problems… wow this blows.
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