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DEATH to my ICH9R RAID 5??

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Lavath

Registered
Joined
Jun 26, 2007
Location
Yorba Linda, ca, 92886
http://www.thatmetalbox.com/Ich9rRaidFail

"MISSING HARD DRIVE" on 2 of my 4 drives in RAID manager. (Matrix Storage Console)
Using Intel ICH9R raid 5 I had total of around 2100 gigabytes I used for storage of my writings and art and music, I use rarely - mostly for safe storage, upon turning it on today, tried to browse to its network share via my main computer, I noticed that its main share was not there, It turns out that its raid 5 volume has trouble! 2 of the drives say "Non-Raid Disc" Please look on to my personal site I have placed html page with simple jpeg pictures

http://www.thatmetalbox.com/Ich9rRaidFail
Please Please Please help me I spent $2400 on this system just to have a large and SAFE storage, this is most important to me, life importance to me, help me help!
Matt Hamutoff
[email protected]

ps board is Gigabyte S-series
GA-P35-DS3P, with the intel core duo e6600
 
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Not good that 2 disks say non-raid disk. Never seen that, I have had a degraded and failed drive (thats what it said) but when I went into Crtl-i it asked if I wanted to rebuild, it turned the failed drive into normal and then rebuilt in windows.

Do you have any idea how this happend?


I would not trust intels on board raid, my raid 5 has to rebuild when I get a blue screen and alot of times I think the blue screen is caused by intel matrix raid software, I am thinking of either running drives by themselves or getting a hardware raid controller, very important stuff should be back up out side of the raid volume also


If something is wrong with your ICHR itself you can swap motherboards and reinstall and setup everything and it should setup correctly, hook up everything the same way on the new board like the same drives into the same ports, you might try that as a last option, if its the raid controller itself that is messed up it might be able to fix it.

Is there a chance someone went into crtl-i and made those 2 disks non-raid? If so I dont think there is a solution.
 
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intels RAID 5 sucks. I had an array fail on me...lost 2 of 3 drives on a reboot for no reason. Luckily I was only experimenting and had everything backed up.

I did have a similar problem like this with my RAID 0 array. Did you change any BIOS settings or have any reboots or changes? I had a random lock and on restart the BIOS reset itself and my HDD's were set in non-RAID mode and it looked much like your setup. Go into the BIOS and make sure all your stuff is setup for RAID and not normal (JMicron onboard as well as chipset). Once you change all those to RAID or the correct settings can't remember the exact settings for mine, and you may be mixing a northbridge controller with 4 ports and a JMicron or similar with 2 or similar config.
*EDIT* NOTICE!!! I said the BIOS, do not F with the ctr-i if you do that will surely destroy it and make it nearly impossible to remake.

If that doesn't work,
In windows can you choose to create an array using the disks without destroying the array?
If that doesn't work I would take a one shot chance of tell windows to delete the raid 5 array, then re-create it with the same drives, in the same order you chose before. And pray.
NOTICE!!! I said windows, again do not F with ctr-i, that's a very simple interface and it isn't nearly as robust as the windows intel storage manager
 
Yea once or twice when an oc failed or I had a hard reboot the mobo BIOS defaulted back to non-RAID settings for the SATA ports and the drives just appeared as individual drives in the BIOS rather than as an array. When that happened the RAID 0 partitions wouldn't boot at all though, it looks like you can still boot? In any case all I did was change the SATA ports back to RAID in the mobo BIOS and all was good.
 
There was a power failure even though Smart-UPS 1400

Thank you for your help folks
There was a power failure even though Smart-UPS 1400 was plugged in and has a brand new (5 months) $120 battery, ANTS had eaten into the unit, into a large transformer, they had hundreds of baby larvae, the unit failed on the first power outage, it lasted about 6 seconds then the storage computer, my personal PC and my wife's PC shut down.... slammed down I guess it is.

How do you like that? Brand new machine, I spent HUNDREDS of hours organizing my data store on and used the LARGEST backups on my system of ANYONE I know and it fails the first time it was needed, not only fail, its destroyed by ants and destroys my data.

No one touched the data-store computer except me, nobody modified the bios. After this happened I did reset the bios settings to default, and had to select "RAID" setting for the Intel ICH9r

Does this help anyone help me?
Could I pay thousands of dollars to have a company "save" my array?
Any suggestions?
Will it cost $2000 at a minimum?
ahhahahhh haa haaaaaa
Too bad this happened just after my car was totaled that I worked on for 2 years and only drove for .5 mile before totaled... then bought a replacememnt car that has a destroyed frame, got scammed, so Im in lots of pain so move to using hte computer and internet lots and VOILA the only system that matters gets X'ed
 
Yea once or twice when an oc failed or I had a hard reboot the mobo BIOS defaulted back to non-RAID settings for the SATA ports and the drives just appeared as individual drives in the BIOS rather than as an array. When that happened the RAID 0 partitions wouldn't boot at all though, it looks like you can still boot? In any case all I did was change the SATA ports back to RAID in the mobo BIOS and all was good.

Yes this was my first thought, that It had reset itself, so I made sure the bios was completely reset by defaulting to "failsafe" options first then changing to the raid options... I suppose there are settings I could have forgotton? It seems pretty straight forward, there is one setting to enable the ICH9r...

I did all my set-up, experminatations, and environment with the raid disconnected or pre raid creation. I was very careful methodical and Installed a few OS before I was happy, actually I needed 2003 or vista to get my > 2TB raid volume so that limited my choices: Microsoft at least

So my OS is just a simple IDE...
 
You have P35 correct? 2 of your sata ports probably are controlled by the jmicron controller. Connect your HD's to the first 4 ports 0,1,2,3 , if you are using port 4,5 you might not be going directly through the ICH9R and maybe its not liking it.

According to your screen shots you are using 2,3,4,5 ports
 
You have P35 correct? 2 of your sata ports probably are controlled by the jmicron controller. Connect your HD's to the first 4 ports 0,1,2,3 , if you are using port 4,5 you might not be going directly through the ICH9R and maybe its not liking it.

According to your screen shots you are using 2,3,4,5 ports

ok thanks for the suggestion, I moved them, there are 2 ports off to the side and a block of 4, I had used the block of 4, but I moved 4 & 5 to 0 & 1 (the block of 2), however same message except now it says that problem of ports 0 & 2 missing.....

yes p35, more stats and photos here, not really related to this failure but it could help?
http://www.thatmetalbox.com/ITEM/MediaComputerBuild/
 
I dont know if this helps or if it matters but the system takes about 5 minutes to start up now, it used to take 45 seconds or so.... Thats a huge difference, is there any significence

also the RAID was not active when the power failed... the computer had been sitting at idle for hours. The OS is on a single IDE along with the paging file. There is nothing system about the RAID, just my precious irreplacible data
 
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Could I pay thousands of dollars to have a company "save" my array?

Could I pay thousands of dollars to have a company "save" my array?
Any suggestions?
Will it cost $2000 at a minimum?
 
Hmm I dunno about saving that array but I save two copies of all my data on different drives outside the main rig.....so anything can be rebuilt...consider any method non safe for storage, only MULTIPLE copies feels safe to me.....

Just don't do anything drastic yet, so as not to make it worse.. someone may have good advice yet...
perhaps another board? or disk diagnostics?
 
keep messing around with it trying different things, check and recheck its setup correctly in bios

Try out some free raid 5 recovery software, it might get you something.

Dont format or erase the raid setup. Are the disks themselves fine? Can you bench mark them (put it in IDE mode and you can bench each one separate and run diagnostics)?
Try another MB (ICH9 or 8)?
 
Hmm I dunno about saving that array but I save two copies of all my data on different drives outside the main rig.....so anything can be rebuilt...consider any method non safe for storage, only MULTIPLE copies feels safe to me.....

Just don't do anything drastic yet, so as not to make it worse.. someone may have good advice yet...
perhaps another board? or disk diagnostics?


yes but the problem of redundant 2 TB storage is that my system cost $2400, I cant very well double that up, it took a year of saving and planning to get the system I have, and only a few uses for it to fail. Intel sent me this helpful hint:
Thank you for contacting Intel(R) Technical Support.

As far as we understand, you have 2 hard drives out of 4 that failed, therefore the RAID 5 volume is reported as Failed in the CTRL+I utility.

Unfortunately, once a RAID 5 volume status becomes “Failed” there is no way to recover the volume so it will be necessary to re-create the volume.

Note: doing this will destroy the information stored in the RAID 5 volume.


so a brand new raid board fails and they say oh just do it again... so will it simply continue to fail? Im glad these bozos dont design aircraft!!!

so what raid utilities could I use? what disk utilities?
 
yes but the problem of redundant 2 TB storage is that my system cost $2400, I cant very well double that up, it took a year of saving and planning to get the system I have, and only a few uses for it to fail. Intel sent me this helpful hint:
Thank you for contacting Intel(R) Technical Support.

As far as we understand, you have 2 hard drives out of 4 that failed, therefore the RAID 5 volume is reported as Failed in the CTRL+I utility.

Unfortunately, once a RAID 5 volume status becomes “Failed” there is no way to recover the volume so it will be necessary to re-create the volume.

Note: doing this will destroy the information stored in the RAID 5 volume.


so a brand new raid board fails and they say oh just do it again... so will it simply continue to fail? Im glad these bozos dont design aircraft!!!

so what raid utilities could I use? what disk utilities?

Make sure there's a PCI and PCI-E lock.
 
Have you tried clearing cmos and then enabling raid and setting boot disk?

If you set it up as IDE how long does it take windows to load?
 
I've had issues with ICH8 with Raid 5 in the past where it seemed like 1 out of every 3 reboots it had to rebuild the array. And then after a while it just totally crapped out dropping 2 drives of the 3 out. I said forget it and just kept to RAID 0.

Definatly sorry to hear it happened but I know myself that it was a huge pain to get RAID 5 working properly, and even then it was sub-par performance. Making a RAID 0+1 array might better suit you while theres less overall space you get speed and added redundancy of data.
 
I've had this happen before with intel ICH arrays, and I've never been able to repair the array without a complete rebuild.

You could try a demo version of some recovery software, so you can at least see if it can find anything. http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Data_Recovery_Download.shtml

Just don't save or write anything to the discs you're trying to recover.

RAID 1 is the safest way to go, or RAID 10 if you need more uninterrupted space.

Good Luck.
 
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