RAID Rage

[Walter Biscardi]

[Mo] ”
Anyone have a systematic way to figure things out?”

Always best to work with the RAID manufacturer with issues like this. I have used Medea for years and they always work directly with me if I have any SCSI or Fibre Channel issues.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[David Battistella]

Maybe an individual drive in your raid has failed. If it was a raid zero it would not mount. Have you tried to initialize the drive and reformat it. Does it show up in disk utility? Can you mount it from there?

Simple stuff to torubleshoot.

David

[Michael Peele]

Yeah, what type of RAID (brand and type) do you have?
Is it making any new noises?
Are the lights flashing differently than usual?
Have you tried something like techtool pro on it?
Mike

[Mo Gardner]

I’m running a Rourke Data setup using Cheetah drives. Just used the ATTO Config Tool and got it to mount… then it went away again. While it was mounted, I ran Disk Warrior on it. Restart gave me the drives back again, then I had to bail for a while. Will check it out this evening.

What is Tech Tools?

[Michael Gissing]

After upgrading to 10.3.9 my raid went offline as well. I was using an ATTO fibre card. I contacted the ATTO people about this and they sent me a beta software driver that fixed the problem. I suspect the release version of this software has been on their download site for months now.

[Michael Peele]

I am assuming you use software to stripe your disks (most likely ATTO or Apples’ Disk Utility). If you have a hardware RAID’ed array, just erase the array when I say restripe.

It sounds like you are close – your data is most likely recoverable. If you don’t need your data, just skip the rest of this message and restripe your array.

TechTool Pro is another disk utility. I tend to have better luck with it finding volumes that don’t mount. If DiskWarrior is able to work on the volume, they are about the same in ability to repair. Nothing beats a variety of utilities when trying to recover a downed volume.

You may have done this already, but make sure to power down everything, disconnect and reconnect your SCSI cables, power on the drives and then power up the Mac. It’s always good to make sure that your SCSI chain is powered up prior to turning on the Mac. Check that your drives are terminated and that the SCSI ID’s are logically ordered and nothing is set to ID 7.

If mounting the drive remains an iffy situation, get all the data off that you need while it is mounted. Once you have transfered the data to another drive, restripe your drives (which erases the array).

If Diskwarrior or TechTool Pro reports lots of errors but manages to recover the volume, you may still want to restripe once you have retrieved your data – just to be safe.

[Mo Gardner]

Thanks to everyone for your input. Sounds like I’d better restripe before my next big project start.