Grey-hound wrote:
> On boot up my system sez Detecting raid setup
> 0 Degraded nvidea mirror
> 1 Degraded nvidea mirror
> System works normally except for this.
> I thought I was having a Vista software networking problem and loaded
> the startup disks which reformatted everything but turned out not to be
> the problem. Then what I had before everything reformatted came back
> (which is great) but now I get this raid message in red. What I want
> raid to do for me is to mirror the other drive in case of a crash (I
> think) as I'm mostly a home office/web browser/ newsgroup and MSOffice
> user.
> Thanks
> Tampa, FL
Pg.130 "Rebuilding a RAID Array" (~6MB download)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_raid.html
The manual is not very good, in that it seems to be missing a complete
display of all dialog boxes. If it showed all the dialogs, it might be
clearer to a reader, as to what is going on.
A degraded state for RAID 1, means that the two disks are no longer
mirror copies of one another. The assumption becomes valid, as soon
as an OS has booted from the array, while the two disks are not
doing exactly the same thing. That means the data contents of the
two disks have diverged.
The rebuild procedure will consists of specifying the "source" disk
(the one with the good data copy on it), and then specifying a
"destination" disk. Any procedure on a RAID should offer a
"do it" button, stating the assumptions about which disk is source
and which is destination.
If the Nvidia software really is as poor as the above document makes
it look, I cannot see the software telling you what is actually
going on. When dealing with the *only* copy of the data you've got,
that would make me "very nervous".
One way you can make the situation more obvious.
1) Connect only one drive. Boot from it. (You cannot make the degrade
status worse than it already is, so this won't hurt.) If you see
the version of data you want, put a label on the drive ("good one").
2) Shut down. Disconnect the "good" disk. Connect the "undesired disk".
Enter the RAID BIOS screen in the BIOS. Do a "Delete array" on the
"undesired disk". It should return to the "spare pool".
3) Now connect both disks, the "good" one and the now "empty" or
"spare" one. You should be able to boot from the remaining member
of the broken RAID1.
4) Now, while in Windows, carry out the "rebuild" procedure, as specified
in the above manual. Now, it should be more obvious, as to which disk
is which. At the point you rebuild, the Nvidia Windows software should
know that the good disk is the one which has the degraded array on it,
while the empty disk is in the "spares" pool. So even if the disks
are physically identical, you should be able to complete this procedure,
without confusion.
Once the rebuild is complete, you should be able to reboot, and see in
both the RAID BIOS and in the Windows RAID utility window, that the
array status has returned to "healthy".
Doing a backup, from the array, to a third disk, is also a good idea.
Just because you have two disks with identical data, doesn't mean
that the software cannot wipe both out in an instant. Say, while
the user selects the wrong option from the RAID control panel
I can give another example. Someone here had a SIL3112 based SATA
RAID setup. They had a mirror. One disk failed. The second disk
worked, but to the guy's horror, the data on it was old. For some
reason, the software had not been mirroring for about 3 months.
And yet the array status did not reflect this fact. So the guy
had basically lost 3 months of data. Based on that experience,
it should be obvious that the mirror, is no protection at all.
Back it up!
Paul
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