Re: URGENT: Need help rebuilding iir RAID5 array with failed drive

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 11:30 AM, Derek Ragona
<derek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
At 05:49 AM 6/28/2008, you wrote:

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 2:02 AM, Søren Schmidt <sos@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Erm, this makes no sense at all. You state you use the "iir" driver for
the
card, yet you expect to see the devices under ATA ? Those are two very
different animals, you can't use them together in away way or fashion on
the
same drives.

That asks the question: which one is it ?

If you use "iir" I have no idea how/if a rebuild is possible under
FreeBSD,
however it could be in the BIOS or with any other OS that supports it
(here
the HW should have kept your parity data intact).

If you use ATA you shouldn't have used RAID5 as the docs tell you, as
there
will be no parity data to rebuild from no matter what BIOS/OS you use ->
you
will get garbage no matter what.

Uhm... ok, I'll bite. What documentation states how to use RAID's
under FreeBSD properly? The GEOM docs didn't seem to be what I was
looking for back then.

Thanks for the help and support. This definitely served as a lesson to
backup my data more often...

That by itself may be worth all the trouble :)

No doubt.

Thanks :),
-Garrett

You can either use the built in RAID software in FreeBSD or use the hardware
makers RAID outside FreeBSD.

If you use the internal FreeBSD for a software RAID, most recommend you use
the RAID for non-boot, using a separate disk to boot from. Basically using
a smaller drive for / so the system is bootable and configurable with or
without RAID. Then add your RAID after installing FreeBSD.

If you choose to just setup a RAID array in the hardware, then usually
FreeBSD just see this volume as one large single drive you can partition and
use like one huge virtual disk. In the case of errors or failures you need
to check the console logs when the system boots. I wouldn't recommend this
method UNLESS you do RAID 10 with hot spare drives. So any drive failures
are rebuilt for you, so errors on reboots will still need to be checked, but
just to see if a drive needs to be replaced.

Depending on the systems use, you may find it easier to use one of the
"packaged" solutions based on FreeBSD, such as:
www.freenas.org
or
http://m0n0.ch/wall/

Thanks for the comments Derek, Soren, and Ed.

FWIW (I've discovered this through personal experience and reading a
lot of docs), the only way to get "hardware RAID" with iir and the
ICH9R chipset is through the Matrix Manager (either by creating one at
the BIOS level console or Windows -- bleh). FreeBSD spotted it as a
single drive (/dev/ar0), so at that point it was being managed by the
southbridge.

Performance sucks, the array rebuild takes eons (16 hours for adding a
1TB drive to an existing 4 x 750GB drive array with an Core 2 E6700
with 2GB RAM under Vista x64) and the rebuild console is _only_
available under Windows =(.

At least it's keeping the filesystem intact though, long enough for me
to make a redundant copy of the data then move all this junk over to
another safe place while I grab DVD+R/W's and wait for my 3ware card
to come in the mail..

Thanks,
-Garrett
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