Hi Guys,

Had to shut down my servers for a while to move them to a new rack in our Data Center. Here is where the nightmare began! One of the servers was running fine, we shut it down and rebooted. It booted fine and started doing the RAID regeneration again. However, at 2% it stops and says the RIGHT HARD DRIVE HAS FAILED AND NEEDS REPLACEMENT. So, we replaced it with an identical backup 40GB Seagte 5200 rpm drive...it would not boot! got stuck at checking disk. Tried 3 different disks, all the same problem.

Finally, put back the original drive which was reported to be faulty and the server booted again. But again, the RAID generation stopped at 2% and the same DRIVE FAILED error came out.

We are so frustrated! Anyone can advise what we can do to get the raid running again without having to reinstall?

If we do have to reinstall, is there a quick way to backup the RAQ4r, reinstall the OS and restore the settings and web sites,user accounts and passwords to it's original state without having to do that all manually?

Sometimes the checking disk looks like its halted but actually its still doing its rounds and restoring your disk.

try plugging in a Null Modem cable and see what messages you are getting and stalling on and tell us about it so we can know whats wrong.

Hi,

Ok will do. FYI, the first few times we tried putting in the new HD's, the server went to checking disk and the HD light was not blinking at all...it was like that for about 1 hour before we decided that it was not actually doing anything.

From your experience, how long can this checking disk activity go on? The longest we have experienced is about 50 minutes then the server boots.

the longest I got was half a day :P But that was on a RaQ4 with 80GB HDDs.
As for RaQ550s, we have never experienced anything above 30 minutes on Raid1 and 80GB HDDs.

Thanks mate! Half a day is forever. My RAQ's have 40GB's in them. Maybe I will try to put in the new HD again, sit back with a nice tall glass of ice lemon tea and wait it out...will keep you posted.

Sure :) But do try to get a Null Modem cable and plug into the first serial slot because that will instantly tell you whats faulty.

I too have a Raq that sits forever at checking disk. we rebooted it this morning and it has not come up yet. forver = 2 hours now. did your system ever come back up? it doesn't seem normal for the checking disk to be going on but no disk light activity. is that what should happen? the disk activity light went out after the first 1.5 hours of heavy flashing. now it just sits there.

attach the null modem cable to ttyS0 per the other recommendations. that will tell you instantly what's going on, whether it's doing anything or not, etc. why guess and wonder when you can know for sure??

I have heard rumors of some units shipping with the IDE cables reversed. It says "right" disk is bad, when in reality "left" is bad.

If you open the case and look in from the front (bezel towards you), the IDE connector on the front of the mobo (usually black) should be connected to the drive on the right side (behind the "RaQ" badge). That's your "primary" HD (/dev/hda).

The IDE connector on top of the mobo (usually blue) should be connected to the drive on the left (behind the LEDs), and that would be the "secondary" HD (/dev/hdc).