raid 5 recovery
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Thread: raid 5 recovery

  1. December 26th, 2005, 03:25 AM #1
    s_hcl
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    raid 5 recovery

    I have configured a hardware raid 5 ,with 4 hdds(72 gb) with one has spare..I have one doubt ,If the primary partition

    fails and i replace it with a spare drive ,will it rebuilt the system and boot partition.I have read some articles which

    mention that the system and boot partition cannot be fault tolerant in a raid 5 array.

    Can someone help reg this ,who has faced a practical prob .
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  2. December 28th, 2005, 11:05 PM #2
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    alc6379
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    If you're running a hardware RAID, there should be some option in the RAID BIOS to set a drive as failed. Either that, or it is done automatically. Once you replace a drive, you set it as working, and the RAID should rebuild. Keep in mind, the system can even still boot in degraded mode, because it can determine the proper data using the parity bit from the parity drive.

    I've never worked on hardware RAID directly, but that's how every software RAID I've ever run works. I don't see why it should be any different under hardware.
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  3. December 28th, 2005, 11:09 PM #3
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    ProfessorU
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    Confusion:
    Did you partition your RAID array into three parts? You probably just want one partition (which should be the default).
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  4. December 28th, 2005, 11:10 PM #4
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    alc6379
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    Quote Originally Posted by ProfessorU
    Confusion:
    Did you partition your RAID array into three parts? You probably just want one partition (which should be the default).
    You can partition a RAID 5 volume just like any regular drive. That shouldn't make a difference. All the RAID card sees when it's doing its thing are the 1's and 0's that make up the data. It doesn't see things like the MBR or partition tables.
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  6. December 29th, 2005, 08:39 AM #5
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    Hardware RAID will recover completely from a single drive failure.

    The limitation you've been reading about is where you do RAID entirely in software (ie Windows Disk Management) -- during the boot process there's no RAID support at all, so if the single drive the machine is relying on at that point fails, the machine won't boot.
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  7. December 29th, 2005, 12:23 PM #6
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    That's why Tuttle gets paid the big $! I learned something new this morning.
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  8. December 29th, 2005, 05:47 PM #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tuttle
    Hardware RAID will recover completely from a single drive failure.
    There should be a caveat here: "...as long as your RAID controller does its job and doesn't forget that the array exists." We've had a RAID 5 array die completely from a single drive failure; the controller ignored the preconfigured hot spare drive and just fell over completely. After a reboot, no array defined.

    RAID is not a substitute for backups. It increases availability but that's it.
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