help - catastrophic RAID failure ...

[Andrew Atrens]

Hi Folks,

FYI, I've forwarded this along to the Highpoint folks - can someone
give any advice on the FreeBSD side of things ? In particular, Soren,
since I'm planning on not using the highpoint driver to recover this
situation, would you think the atapiraid driver should be able to
see the new array ?

Also, can anyone give any general advice on reconstructing partition
tables. I used the 4.7 installer to partition the disks the first time.
And I'm pretty sure that I remember the partition sizes. Well, all 
except the swap partition (but I think that that was 3G). I realise that
recovering this might be an iterative process but am hopeful that if
I get the 'a' partition back the rest may <slowly> fall back into place.
This time around I guess I'll be using the 4.9 installer - does anyone
know if there's any substantive differences in how it sets up it's 
partitions/filesystems vs the 4.7 installer ?

As always, any advice you folks could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Andrew.


---


Hi I've got a RocketRAID 404, and I'm running FreeBSD 4.9.  When I upgraded
drivers from 1.2 to 1.22 my machine locked up on boot. On the next reboot
the RAID array ( I had a 4 disk 160G 1/0 striped-mirrored RAID ) was 
reported as being severely damaged, I was prompted to 'check cables' and was 
presented with 3 options - Destroy, Reboot, or Continue.

My controller BIOS was at 2.11. Being hopeful, I upgraded my BIOS to 
2.13c and rebooted again. Same message. Next I downgraded my BIOS back to 2.11.

The BIOS showed the drives as being something like -

1.  Primary: Maxtor 80G ATA/133, BOOT  (Free)
    Secondary: not present
2.  Maxtor 120G ATA/133  (120G Striped array)
    Secondary: not present
3.  Primary: Maxtor 80G ATA/133 (Free)
    Secondary: not present
4.  Maxtor 80G ATA/133  (80G Striped array)
    Secondary: not present


At this point I thought that the best thing to do was to delete and 
recreate the array using the same settings as I had used to create it
initially. My thought was that the BIOS, being deterministic, would
create the array in the same way that it had the first time, considering
I was still using the same BIOS version - 2.11 that I had used before.

This worked, but when I rebooted my partition tables were empty. It's my
theory that whatever destroyed the RAID setup also destroyed my partition 
tables, and that there is a good chance that a lot of my data is still there.

So how I'm going to proceed is to try to rebuild my partition tables, 
and hopefully the filesystems will still be there.


What I need from you folks is validation that my understanding of the 
situation is correct, and that I'm proceeding in the correct way.

And, of course, any advice you could give about 'what went wrong' would 
also be MOST appreciated. The RAID array has been so reliable that
I hadn't bothered making any backups in a long, long time - AND I HAD
SOME CRITICAL, IRREPLACEABLE DATA on there. :( :( :(



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