Hard Drives from software raid 5 not showing up

[unraid_1]

I want to put some 750 GB Samsung SATA hard drives I pulled from a Windows Server 2008 box that we're running software raid 5.  They're not showing up...

 

I disassembled the box to use parts of it for the unraid box but still have the hard drive with Server 2008 installed on it.

 

I'm assuming the problem is with something done to the hard drives to make them part of the raid 5.

 

I've plugged them into a Vista box and it hangs at "Verifying DMI Pool Data......." in the bios.

 

Anybody know a solution to get these drives usable again?

[Joe L.]

Does the BIOS see them?

[unraid_1]

Yes.

[Joe L.]

Yes.

Where do you "not see them"?

 

To add a new drive to an array you must stop it and then assign it on the "Devices" page.

 

Do the disks show up there?  If not, do they show up in the syslog?

 

Joe L.

[unraid_1]

I'm going through all of the hard drives now, one by one. Some of them let me boot into Vista.  I them go into Disk Management and convert them to Basic drives and format them.  So far I've found 2 (of 4 tested so far) that won't let me do this.

 

Regarding the drives that hang at "Verifying DMI pool", they hang boot in both Vista and unRaid.

 

So, they are seen in BIOS, but hang the computer.

 

Could this just be a case of a few hard drives going bad since I had my server 2008 array up?

[unraid_1]

I went through all of the hard drives, and 3 out of 6 seem to be okay.  I dunno what would cause a 50% failure rate of the drives.  I'm guessing this must be something else.  If nobody has any other ideas, I'm going to call Samsung tech support tomorrow.  Before I do, I'm going to research the problem a bit more (I'm not looking forward to talking to tech support, lol).  If they can't help me I'll probably just RMA as they're about a year old.

[TSM]

The fact that those drives won't let you get past "verifying dmi pool" is worrysome.  What happens if you put them back in their original positions in the 2008 server?  Will it still boot up?  My first thought was that you should run basic disk utilities from a bootdisk, and kill the partitions on the drives, but it sounds like you might not even be able to get that far with these drives installed.  Have you played with all the hard drive settings in the bios???  IDE emulation, ahci and etc. 

[RobJ]

The "Verifying DMI Pool Data......." message is a BIOS message (not an OS message), that usually pertains to the discovery of a bootable drive.  Usually you 'fix' it by changing your BIOS settings to boot from the correct drive, OR you fix the desired drive so it IS bootable.  In your case, I'm not sure what you were trying to test, as you probably don't want to boot from any of the RAID drives.  You may just need to adjust the BIOS settings so it won't TRY to boot from these drives.

 

If you were trying to boot from an unRAID flash drive, some motherboards are notorious for trying to 'help' you whenever you install hard drives, and change the boot order from your flash drive to the new hard drive.  You will probably have to get used to checking the BIOS boot order, every time you make a change to the installed drives.

 

There have been a number of other cases like this, such as this one.

 

There is probably nothing wrong with any of the drives.

[unraid_1]

The fact that those drives won't let you get past "verifying dmi pool" is worrysome.  What happens if you put them back in their original positions in the 2008 server?  Will it still boot up?  My first thought was that you should run basic disk utilities from a bootdisk, and kill the partitions on the drives, but it sounds like you might not even be able to get that far with these drives installed.  Have you played with all the hard drive settings in the bios???  IDE emulation, ahci and etc. 

 

That server is pretty much gone, I've used parts of it for my unRaid build, but I do have the OS disk still.  As much trouble as it will be to put it back together, I'd rather RMA them first.

 

The fact that those drives won't let you get past "verifying dmi pool" is worrysome.  What happens if you put them back in their original positions in the 2008 server?  Will it still boot up?  My first thought was that you should run basic disk utilities from a bootdisk, and kill the partitions on the drives, but it sounds like you might not even be able to get that far with these drives installed.  Have you played with all the hard drive settings in the bios???  IDE emulation, ahci and etc. 

 

Yeah, that was one of my first thoughts, I tried it all three ways.

 

I'm getting ready to go away for the weekend, but I plan on trying to use the Samsung diagnostic tools on them, then calling their tech support up if that doesn't work.

 

I'll post back once I do that.

 

Problems like these make me glad that I switched to unRaid, lol.

 

A bit off topic, but does anyone know of a script or program that will scan my folders and create a text file with all of the file names?  I'll be honest, I have tried searching for it yet, but I figured if your reading this post anyways...  In my own defense it is my own thread I'm hijacking, lol.

[unraid_1]

The "Verifying DMI Pool Data......." message is a BIOS message (not an OS message), that usually pertains to the discovery of a bootable drive.  Usually you 'fix' it by changing your BIOS settings to boot from the correct drive, OR you fix the desired drive so it IS bootable.  In your case, I'm not sure what you were trying to test, as you probably don't want to boot from any of the RAID drives.  You may just need to adjust the BIOS settings so it won't TRY to boot from these drives.

 

If you were trying to boot from an unRAID flash drive, some motherboards are notorious for trying to 'help' you whenever you install hard drives, and change the boot order from your flash drive to the new hard drive.  You will probably have to get used to checking the BIOS boot order, every time you make a change to the installed drives.

 

There have been a number of other cases like this, such as this one.

 

There is probably nothing wrong with any of the drives.

 

That could be it, however the unRaid hangs happened after unRaid started loading.

 

I noticed it would hang at various times and tried searching for solutions to them, here are some of them:

"Attached SCSI removable disk"

"configured for UDMA/133"

"sata link down"

 

One behavior that I thought was weird, is that half of the drives that were in the server 2008 software raid 5 work fine, while the other half give me the same error/hang.

 

As I stated earlier, I won't be able to respond over the weekend, but plan on troubleshooting it some more around Tuesday or Wednesday.

[prostuff1]

A bit off topic, but does anyone know of a script or program that will scan my folders and create a text file with all of the file names?  I'll be honest, I have tried searching for it yet, but I figured if your reading this post anyways...  In my own defense it is my own thread I'm hijacking, lol.

 

I do not know of something that will do this for you automatically but what I usually do is just navigate to the folder I want the text file from and do an ls on that folder.  Once I have the list of files I just copy and paste it into a text file.

 

I am pretty sure one of our scripting guys could come up with some sed/grep command that would do this.

[Joe L.]

Probably the easiest is

find /mnt/disk* -print

 

To save it to a file on your flash drive, just redirect the output:

find /mnt/disk* -print >/boot/file_list.txt

 

Joe L.

[jupilerman]

Some times ago, i had a similar problem : 1 disk didn't show up in windows xp.

Sometimes, it also freezed the windows booting process.

I never was able to see it into windows.

 

Here is what i did :

boot from a ultimate boot disk with diagnostic tolls.

use fdisk to blank the disk. But not only the partition table, but the whole disk.

It looks like it is factory reset (but smart isn't). Then, i could use the disk normaly as it was new.

 

Beware : disconnect all other HD before to be sure to no blank a wrong one and lose precious data.

 

Hope this can help.