Raid Question - New To

[chugger93]

I'm building a fileserver for my home network. I got a Promise FasTrak TX2000 Raid Card, & 2 Western Digital Caverie 320GB IDE Hard Drives. I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with this raid card, but for those who know RAID well, maybe you can answer me this.

Basically I already had installed 2003 Server on another HD. I have the 2 320Gigers hooked up to the Raid Card on both IDE1 & IDE2. I built the raid from the Promise BIOS when you boot up, and that part works fine. I then formatted the partition in 2003 and it recognized it fine and I could create a document on it fine too.

However I wanted to test the redudancy. For the record, I built a RAID 1, so its mirroring basically. So I disconnected one of the drives, and obviously upon a boot up, the raid controller said there was a critical error, it couldnt find the drive etc, which is fine. However when I got into windows, and checked "My Computer" the drive wasn't there, nor in computer management.

I thought that if 1 of the drives fails, or loss of power, etc then the drive will still function and be shown, but its not. Do I have the theory incorrect? The instructions even say that if one drive fails your data is still intact?

[YeOldeStonecat]

I thought that if 1 of the drives fails, or loss of power, etc then the drive will still function and be shown, but its not. Do I have the theory incorrect?

No, you're not incorrect. It should give you a warning in BIOS, and in the software utility in Windows...but you should still see it just fine (the 1 surviving drive).

[chugger93]

Same goes for the other drive right? No matter which drive I unplug after the array is setup, I should still see the drive in windows?

Hmm, wonder why its not working. It creates the array like right away when I set it up in the promise BIOS. Like in 1 second then I reboot and it identifies it fine. I dont duplicate the image, cuz I dont think I need too. Hmmm

[chugger93]

n/m, finally got it! I had each harddrive set to master and slave. So one HD was a M, and the other was a S, which caused the conflict. Now that they are both Master, it works great! If I pull the plug on one HD, the other still is there and all my data. Good deal! Thanks for the help YeOlde! This is cool stuff. The only other thing I dont understand is, now that I plugged back in one of the HD's, it still shows the error on the promose POST screen. Still says like "Critical Error" which is wierd, cuz i Plugged back in the HD. Unless I have to rebuild it now because of that unplugged? IF so thats retarded. Hopefully one of my drives never losses power else I have to rebuild Im assuming?

Granted right now I can just re-create the array since theres no data on it yet, but Im just thinking longterm.

[morbidpete]

Thanks for the help YeOlde

Duuuuuuuuuuuudddeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, ouch :D

just messing with ya cat

[YeOldeStonecat]

n/m, finally got it! I had each harddrive set to master and slave. So one HD was a M, and the other was a S, which caused the conflict. Now that they are both Master, it works great! If I pull the plug on one HD, the other still is there and all my data. Good deal! Thanks for the help YeOlde! This is cool stuff. The only other thing I dont understand is, now that I plugged back in one of the HD's, it still shows the error on the promose POST screen. Still says like "Critical Error" which is wierd, cuz i Plugged back in the HD. Unless I have to rebuild it now because of that unplugged? IF so thats retarded. Hopefully one of my drives never losses power else I have to rebuild Im assuming?

Granted right now I can just re-create the array since theres no data on it yet, but Im just thinking longterm.

Glad it worked...I haven't worked with Promise RAID in a while...but I do recall it as quite standard. Figured it was something BIOS related, either relating to system since it wasn't primary bootable device, or in the Promise setup itself.

When a RAID tanks....and you replace the faulty drive...it will remain in a critical state for a while as the array "rebuilds"...it will be running it a lowered performance state.

No matter which drive you unplug..if the RAID was healthy, and you unplug any drive, the other will still show up. If the RAID went bad...and you unplug the good drive...leaving the bad drive...yeah you probably won't see it in Windows depending on how hosed the bad drive is.