Pre-Built System Problems: Bad RAID Card?

[feather]

Hi all,

 

I have a pre-built system with 12 300GB EIDE drives. This morning, the web configuration utility informed me that disk 5 was missing. I tried re-seating the drive and, after restarting, the utility reported both disks 4 and 5 were missing. After a second reboot, the system recognized disk 4, but disk 5 was still missing. I replaced disk 5 and the system recognized the new drive, so I restarted the array. After a few writes to the drive and no reported errors, the new drive was reported as disabled. I tried the method suggested in the documentation to get the system to re-enable the drive:

 

stopped array

powered down

removed drive

restarted array

stopped array

powered down

replaced drive

restarted array

 

Now, with the new drive in place, the utility says disk 5 is disabled and not installed. Interestingly, disks 4 and 5 are on the same channel of the RAID card and trouble with the array first started when I couldn't access disk 4 from the network. Shortly prior to this, I noticed that the web utility showed that disk 4 wasn't spinning down (solid green icon) along with the other drives. Since disks 4 and 5 are the only drives on this channel and they're both behaving suspiciously, it seems the problem may be with the Promise card.

 

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

 

 

J

[WeeboTech]

If disk 4 and 5 are on the same cable (channel as mentioned in prior text).

Then you may want to check the status of disk 4.

 

When two drives share the same cable, either one of them can bring down the other drive.

 

Also when mixing drives of different vendors, sometimes you have to force each drive to be a master or slave, rather then using cable select.

 

For example, one one of my systems, when I mixed a maxtor and a WD drive on the same cable, they would not work with cable select. I had to set one to master, the other to slave.

In another situation, I had to switch positions in order to get it to work.

 

I don't recommend you switch positions, but perhaps put drive 5 somewhere else on it's own channel and rebuild it there.

[feather]

 

Thanks for the reply Weebo.

 

Since my first post, I reseated the Promise card and its cabling to drives 4 and 5 and, after restarting the system, the original disk 5 was recognized and successfully rebuilt. However, the web utility is still showing me that when the system is idle, drive 4 is not spinning down. So although the system is fully operational again something still seems to be amiss.

 

I should also point out that the current configuration, aside from one drive failure, has been working without issue for about 3 years.

 

I'm not mixing drive types and the rebuilt disk 5 is now the original drive that was identified as missing yesterday with the same jumper settings (cable select on both disks 4 and 5) as has been working for years prior. Any thoughts on what my next diagnostic step might be? Since the problem appears to be with disk 4, I could try replacing and rebuilding it. Any thoughts on why it's not spinning down. The web utility isn't incrementing its read or write values, so it doesn't appear that the system is polling the drive when idle.

 

 

J

[feather]

 

Update: seems drive 4 was the problem after all. Upon trying to access it, both drives 4 and 5 were disabled. Replacing and rebuilding disk 4 seems to have sorted everything. Thanks again for the advice.

 

J