[aftermath]

Any one know how to force a rebuild of a failed raid 5 set (part of a raid 50 set) 2 drives failed in quick succession? One reappeared and a rebuild was automatically initiated/under way so consider one disk dud. can I persuade the array to rebuild from the dive that failed second if I can get it to spin up/work?
any one done this?

I was foolishly ordering a replacement when the second failed.

I figure that a rebuild ignore parity will not fix the os but maybe my media+hl2 +civ saves could be saved as they were not open.... my cv and documents were nice and safe on my server as is the hl2 backup (mini woot) down side i have a lot of ISOs that i never burnt because of virtual machines and virtual cd roms.

At this point it looks like I have nothing left to loose so now it becomes a new learning experience, "Data recovery experiments".

ta in advance.

[dmitryk]

Do you have 6 drive RAID 50. Does all level are hardware or you have a mix of software and hardware?

Rebuild might be possible , depending on the configuration of you hardware. The issue you might face is partial rebuild. That could mess everything up. E.g. if one of the drive (either currently rebuilding or other one) will have bad sectors, the rebuild will stop and you will have failed array again.

If you ignore parity the corruption of filesystem and files will defend how long has been between disk failures. drives+parity should contains latest snapshot of the data, where just pure drive likely will have stale data.

As you already identify if rebuild will finish correctly (didn't mix up sequence of the drives) you will have corruption only old files will be ok. Fresh files will be corrupted as well as filesystem will be corrupted. (run chkdsk)

[aftermath]

yes 6 drive hardware raid50 I think both failed units are on the same sub set.
I have a conflict between raid card config bios and the mainboards bios its in so I will first have to pop it in to this machine.

well ill try and see if five drives will work... Im waiting for a spare.

EDIT

I need a back up strategy all 6 drives appear ok.


I found the probable cause of my problems last night. I had a bundle of wires all tied up. the top disk in the raid set was supporting the entire weight on its molex. this cam lose and pulled the sca adepter out of the drive below just a touch not really noticeable till I pushed on it to make sure it was OK.

A few extra tie-raps should support the weight of those cables now and iv made sure the whole lot have some slack.

I could not convince the card that the missing disks were still there. it could see them but did not want to rebuild with out first wiping those disks and could not rebuild after wiping (maybe I wiped the wrong id ?). SO iv lost a few ISOs most are Linux and I have a feeling that the rest are on another raid set my movies are still on the DVDs and my save games are just games. I think I have a back up of my IM contact list.
rather gald all my work and profile was on another computer(server) most my downloads are on another untouched disk, and most the drivers service packs etc are on my 2k install CD

my spare will now be a hot spare.