RAID 1 Failure NVraid

[jjjkkk]

I have a similar problem guys. I am at my wits end with this one and I hope someone can help meee!

I have a Gigabyte M61PM-S2 rev2.0 (chipset: Nvidia Geforce 6100/nForce 430).

I have a 3 disk RAID 5 array (3 x Samsung (400GB) HD400LJ) and was set as bootable. The Windows SBS 2k3 R2 installation started acting up so I decided to install a 4th HDD to boot off only and keep the 3 disk RAID 5 array for storage only.
While in the new OS I accidentally did *something* to one of the RAID disks and it got corrupted (aaaargh!).... well no cause to panic. All I needed to do was rebuild the array, right? WRONG!!!!
For the life of me I cant rebuild the array! There are two ways to do this: through BIOS or Windows (using the Control Panel).

Through BIOS the Mediashield Utility tells me that the array has an error. It shows me 2 diska which are fine and when I select the REBUILD option it adds my 3rd disk into the array, So far so good. Now the array has 3 disks in it but the status is still ERROR. There doesnt seem to be anything more I can do in this utility so I exit hoping the array will rebuild.... it never does. When I reboot the PC it goes back to square one and no matter how many times I try to rebuild the array NOTHING happens!!!
Mediashield BIOS version is 6.94

Through Windows (this is the new installation of windows on the new non-raid disk. The original windows installation is not bootable because of the raid error) I have installed Control Panel and it shows me the RAID 5 in the 'error' state. It shows 2 healthy disks in the array and one 'free disk'. There are 2 options: CREATE ARRAY and DELETE ARRAY. There is no REBUILD ARRAY option ANYWHERE!!!! I cant do ANYTHING!!!
Im using version 6.86

I read through a few threads. They mention to try different versions of Mediashield. I finally found version 6.82 (which is supposedly meant to work for this exact problem). But the windows drivers keep going to the latest version. I tried manually deleting the files for the newer version, rolling back, uninstalling and reinstalling but nothing seems to work.

Being a Network Engineer ive rebuild raid arrays before but its NEVER been this difficult! what is the deal Nvidia???? How in the world could you possibly sell a product which doesnt do the MOST IMPORTANT feature? the whole point of RAID is exactly for this! ARRRGH!


Thanks in advance for your help guys.

EDIT: Just wanted to add a screenshot of the latest version of Mediashield im using.
As you can see, the rebuild option is not there. The array is in error and I cant do anything at all with this screen other than delete the array!

[jjjkkk]

Just to add. I was able to get Mediashield version 6.82.



The status stays at "Rebuilding 0%" and doesnt move from there....
anyone else get this? I am starting to worry that my data is lost!!!

[DanB]

I solved my problem..... It turned out there was a bad sector on the "HEALTHY" disk, so the rebuild stopped there each and every time.

To solve it, I used a program
http://pc-care.dk/artikel.php?ID=479
Look for the link "her" in the bottom of the text.

It can scan disks directly from windows and can fix bad sectors.

After I ran it on my disk, I mounted the spare, and it rebuild perfectly

Not Thanks to Nvidia support, Not thanks to TYAN support..... It was all thanks to a lot of time spent on research and a Polish guy that happend to write this lovely software

[jjjkkk]

Thanks for the tip mate.
I downloaded the program and scanned my free drive. The program crashed after scanning 301MB, twice. So im scanning my other drive (known to be healthy) to see if the program crashes for that, so far so good.
If all goes well with this scan then I must assume my free drive is dead. Ill pick up a replacement tomorrow and hope the RAID will rebuild then! Ill post up my progress

*fingers crossed*

[jjjkkk]

Well I picked up a new hard drive the other day and scanned the 2 'healthy' hard drives with the program mentioned above. The 2 healthy ones are working fine but STILL no rebuilding of the array!!! even with the new hard drive in it (and I scanned that too!). Each scan takes about 2 days on a 400GB hard drive but they are all healthy and I cant bloody get this thing working!!!

Please, if anyone knows ANYTHING pls pls pls help me out. Im at my wits end and I CANNOT accept my data is all lost! This is why I got a RAID in the 1st place! ARRRGH!

[drmike]

[jjjkkk]

Glad to hear it worked out well for you in the end mate.
The difference between your problem and mine is that mine is a RAID 5 (2 data disks and 1 parity disk) as opposed to your mirror raid. If one of my hard drives fail I cant simply load my OS from the other 2, I NEED to rebuild the entire array onto a new 3rd disk (well, from what I understand anyways).

So I am too scared to try and delete the array and see what happens. Im assuming if I delete the array the other 2 (healthy) disks will become useless. I am still stuck and dont know what to do. My motherboard manufacturer (gigabyte) replied back to a tech suppor email I sent them and they just palmed me off to nvidia saying they cant help me.

This is useless and I am really, REALLY [peed] off at how [Brad Pitt] nvidia's products are!!!! ARRRRGH!

[mmseng]

Ok so I've been having the same problem about my RAID 1 being broken and not knowing which "mirror" [i.e. disk] to delete and which to rebuild from. I've always been very weary about doing it in the BIOS utility for fear of rebuilding from the wrong disk... I did that once and don't want to do it again.

I've been looking for a windows utility that does the same thing to make it easier, and the original post here helped me out quite a bit, thanks for that, but I still haven't got this completely working.

It would be REALLY REALLY nice if a utility like this let you know which mirror was active (i.e. being used by the system) and which one was inactive, but I guess the whole top/bottom thing works if you know what you're doing. Thankfully somebody around here does.

Anyway, I finally figured out how to get MediaShield running and I get the two mirrors listed, but when I go to delete the bottom one, nothing happens. I've tried right clicking the bottom drive and selecting "Delete Array", I've tried right clicking the bottom title "Mirroring" and selecting "Delete Array", and I've tried selecting each of these and clicking "Delete Array" on the left panel. None of these actions seem to do anything.

The only other option I have is "Hot Plug Array", but I have no idea what that does. It should also be noted that the drives have "PATA Secondary Master" listed next to them in the "Channel" column, so I wonder if I've done something wrong.

EDIT: Wow, even while I was writing this I remember reading something about someone having to run a bat file in MediaShield directory. I ran the RedRaid.bat file, and tried this all again and it worked! It's currently rebuilding my other disk.

Thanks so much to the people in this thread ;]

P.S. Just to be thorough for anyone else coming across this thread and needing extra info, and because it's not immediately obvious, here's what I had to do to get this utility working:
1) Installed nforce driver (only the "Storage" piece is necessary. And I believe you should say "Yes" to install IDE SW support, although this MAY not be necessary)
2) Browse to the IDE\WinXP\raidtool (or IDE\Win2k\raidtool) directory in the directory where you installed the driver. This is not immediately obvious, especially because a) it's the "IDE" directory, and we're probably talking about RAIDing SATA drives here, and b) there are two other directories within the IDE\WinXP (or IDE\Win2k) directory called "sataraid" and "sata_ide", which would make more sense to look in for a SATA RAID manager. But don't be fooled ;]
3) Extract the "RAIDTOOL.cab" file in this directory. I dunno what all will extract .cab files, but I used 7-zip.
4) After the files are extracted, run the "RegRaid.bat" file. You should get a little "successful" window.
5) Run NvRaidMan.exe (This is actually NVIDIA MediaShield) and from then on you can follow instructions previously posted in this thread.

I hope this helps anyone else in my situation ;]

[jjjkkk]

I just got an email informing someone responded to this thread. Been a while since ive been here! I dont have the time to read the above post but I thought id post up how I fixed my issue.

Turns out that I couldnt use the RAID software to restore my RAID at all. So I ended up rebuilding the RAID 5 using a program called "Captain Nemo" (got a cracked version using torrents). You need to use another program to make the RAID array into a file first, then you use Captain Nemo to rebuild the data. Ive forgotten the other programs name but a quick google will find it for you.

Anyways, it took around 2 weeks (yes, 2 weeks!!!) to restore 3 400GB SATA drives. It may have been faster but I had to restore it onto another SATA drive connected to my server through USB, so im sure that slowed it down quite a bit. Almost all of my important data (im hesitant to say ALL because there is so much of it and I havent checked to see if its all there. But so far it all is) has been recovered. However any large files (ie. my divx movies) ended up coming out corrupt on the other end. Not biggie, its just divx movies. But thats something to consider if you have big files to restore.

Make sure you check everything before formatting and re-using the degraded RAID disks!!!

Hope this helps and good luck!!!