April 17, 200917 yr Hi all, I guess I pretty much know the answer to this already.. but it seems I've had 2 drives fail at the same time... :'( Both have suffered power failures by the looks of it, as neither will power up. I assume I have lost all data on both drives?
April 17, 200917 yr Hi all, I guess I pretty much know the answer to this already.. but it seems I've had 2 drives fail at the same time... :'( Both have suffered power failures by the looks of it, as neither will power up. I assume I have lost all data on both drives? It depends. are they "Seagate" SATA drives? There is a whole series of recent firmware versions that failed exactly as you stated, but they are fixable with a firmware update, even if the drive does not seem to be seen by the BIOS. Read about it here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3142.0 Do they share a common power cable? Perhaps it is at fault. (I had that situation in my own server, with an intermittent power splitter being at fault.) Do they share a common disk controller? or a common cable? (As likely as anything to be at fault... easily checked by moving the drives to a different port, or a different controller) If you have not yet rebooted, can you save a copy of your syslog and attach it to the next post. It might give a clue as to what has happened. Even if you have rebooted, a copy of the syslog might still give clues. Finally, if the drives are both really dead, there is always the possibility of a data recovery service being able to get data off of them. (Expensive, but it is possible) Tell us more about how both drives failed... do you suspect one failed, and then the other? or both at the same time? Tell us more. Look on the bright side... on any other raid5, you would have lost ALL your data, not just the two disks... Joe L.
April 17, 200917 yr Author They were both attached to the same power cable. I've tried them in 3 different computers now, neither disk spins up - so must be some sort of power failure. They aren't seagate, one is a WD the other Samsung. I actually dont know what I've lost yet, as I dont know what was on these two specific disks. doh!
April 17, 200917 yr Author So I've put in a spare drive i had lying around to replace one of the two dead drives. What do I do now.. Do I choose "Restore"?
April 17, 200917 yr So I've put in a spare drive i had lying around to replace one of the two dead drives. What do I do now.. Do I choose "Restore"? The button labeled "restore" will not restore any data... ever... It restores an initial super.dat file based on your currently assigned and working drives... (You might need to asign/un-assign the drives as appropriate on the "Devices" page) When you press "restore" it will throw away any previous parity calculations and then start calculating parity on your remaining drives. Don't do it unless there is no other way to get one of the two drives running... (Have you considered trying this? http://www.datarecoverypros.com/hard-drive-recovery-freeze.html) If you can get one of the two drives spinning, you can probably recover the other. If not... you can always re-rip your DVDs. Joe L.
April 18, 200917 yr They were both attached to the same power cable. I've tried them in 3 different computers now, neither disk spins up - so must be some sort of power failure. They aren't seagate, one is a WD the other Samsung. I actually dont know what I've lost yet, as I dont know what was on these two specific disks. doh! Two drives on the same cable died at the same time? Makes me wonder about the safety of the power supply. Are they on the same controller too? What power supply are you using?
April 18, 200917 yr Author They were connected to the same controller yes. There were also 2 other drives on the same power connector which are fine. The Power supply is a 550w clio xpower IIRC.. I'll check that tomorrow. It did come highly rated. I haven't lost anything critical, that stuff is always backed up to other media. But its gonna take me a while to re-rip 1gb worth of dvds! Perhaps now's the time to convert them to mkv as I was considering doing anyway!!
April 19, 200917 yr So I've put in a spare drive i had lying around to replace one of the two dead drives. What do I do now.. Do I choose "Restore"? If you have indeed lost 2 drives in your array, then recovery is not possible. The chances against such an event are extremely low. unRAID increases the odds, however, by being so darn forgiving. If a drive fails, unRAID will simulate it. To the user, all appears to be working fine. There is no warning, the array does not stop. You might notice a slowdown on that ONE disk, or you may notice a red ball instead of a green one next to a failed disk and wonder why that is, but otherwise the situation can go totally unnoticed. In that state, if another drive fails (even months later), then you have lost 2 disks and there is nothing you can do about it then. There are tools here to set up email notifications. That is a great way to be notified, and might be a good standard feature. Without such a feature, however, I would like to see unRAID be more "vocal" when it has this type of error. For example, it could stop the array when a drive is disabled, and allow it to then be restarted - but forcing the user to realize that the error has occurred. Another idea is not automatically starting an array after a reboot if a disk has failed. Again, this would force a user to confront and acknowledge the error at every system reboot. So what should you do? First, convince yourself that both drives are really dead. I think you have already done that, but you might consider taking them to a Mom and Pop type computer store. I had a fried that lost a drive and no amount of fiddling allowed me to read his data. He took it to a small computer shop and they recovered all his data onto a fresh disk for $50. I have no idea what they did. It might cost your a few bucks, but I would at least consider taking the disks in and letting them try. If, in the end, 2 drives are dead, you would need to boot the unRAID server, press the restore button (causes unRAID to forget about the currently defined array), add new disks (if you like) to the array, and then start the array (registers the new array configuration).
April 19, 200917 yr I would like to see unRAID be more "vocal" when it has this type of error. For example, it could stop the array when a drive is disabled, and allow it to then be restarted - but forcing the user to realize that the error has occurred. Another idea is not automatically starting an array after a reboot if a disk has failed. Again, this would force a user to confront and acknowledge the error at every system reboot. This would be a great addition to the software... and if not built-in, pretty easy to do with an add-on script. Easier than sending mail. A shutdown of the array would get attention.. To NOT start automatically when rebooted and the array is missing a drive would also help to get attention. Since we now have a way to send sounds to the motherboard speaker, perhaps that can be part of the solution too. A periodic beep (that can be silenced once noticed) when the array state is abnormal, is certainly helpful in most situations. Lots of possibilities. Joe L.
April 19, 200917 yr Now you come to two of the major benefits of unRAID over RAID5: - You lost 2 drives. All your other data is OK. Under RAID 5, it would all be gone. - You can send the failed drives to someone to recover the data, and they will likely get 99% of it back. Not really possible for RAID5, except for some very expensive specialty places, that are specific to being able to recover the specific RAID5 controller/system you have.
April 20, 200917 yr Author Yep of course you are all correct to state that it could have been worse under different solutions. One thing I'd like to clarify which is crazy if this is true; When 1 disk fails the array works as normal, but the only indication is a red ball?? If so then as I work away a lot and don't check the array very often, its possible 1 disk could have been failed for a while, and a second then failed later... I'd prefer the array went offline, so that my family would know something was wrong and I would fix it on the weekend when i get home..
April 20, 200917 yr One last thing you can also try if you are convinced the 2 drives are really dead is to swap the circuit board on the drive with a working one from an identical model. I have seen this work in some cases and might allow you to recover all of your data. Regardless, good luck with the recovery efforts.
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