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#1
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Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (v1.0) RAID-1 (mirrored) failed.
GA-EP45-DS3R v1.0 mobo. Had 2x Seagate Barracuda SATA, 7200rpm
1,000GB (1TB). I built a RAID-1 (mirroring) system using the RAID BIOS, because my PC _used_ to use a single non-RAID Seagate SATA drive, and that drive failed. So I figured that I was safe with mirroring. When I booted up this morning, the BIOS showed that one of the RAID drives was bad and that the RAID volume had "failed". I heard clicking maybe 4 times yesterday afternoon, but there was no notice that a drive was failing. I disconnected the bad drive, and tried to boot - BIOS can NOT find the boot loader on the good drive. Thinking that when a RAID-1 drive goes bad all I have to do is replace it, so I bought a new Western Digital 1TB drive (I'm done with Seagates), and plugged it in place of the bad Seagate. Still the PC won't boot. If I want to create another RAID volume, it looks like the BIOS wants to erase my HD!! And it will do the same if I change from RAID to non-RAID. I've got LOTS of important stuff on the RAID drives and I can't wipe the drives and start over. What do I do??? BTW -I'm on an old PC, that uses IDE, not SATA, drives -Dave Pollum |
#2
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Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (v1.0) RAID-1 (mirrored) failed.
Dave Pollum wrote:
GA-EP45-DS3R v1.0 mobo. Had 2x Seagate Barracuda SATA, 7200rpm 1,000GB (1TB). I built a RAID-1 (mirroring) system using the RAID BIOS, because my PC _used_ to use a single non-RAID Seagate SATA drive, and that drive failed. So I figured that I was safe with mirroring. When I booted up this morning, the BIOS showed that one of the RAID drives was bad and that the RAID volume had "failed". I heard clicking maybe 4 times yesterday afternoon, but there was no notice that a drive was failing. I disconnected the bad drive, and tried to boot - BIOS can NOT find the boot loader on the good drive. Thinking that when a RAID-1 drive goes bad all I have to do is replace it, so I bought a new Western Digital 1TB drive (I'm done with Seagates), and plugged it in place of the bad Seagate. Still the PC won't boot. If I want to create another RAID volume, it looks like the BIOS wants to erase my HD!! And it will do the same if I change from RAID to non-RAID. I've got LOTS of important stuff on the RAID drives and I can't wipe the drives and start over. What do I do??? BTW -I'm on an old PC, that uses IDE, not SATA, drives -Dave Pollum Boot with another OS and do your forensics on it. I use the Linux LiveCD Knoppix from knopper.net, but there are probably others you could use. Ubuntu from ubuntu.com even. First check, would be to see if there are any partitions. Then try and mount them in Linux. Linux can now handle both FAT32 and NTFS, as well as EXT2 or EXT3 native formats. You can even mount Macintosh disks if you need to (but only to copy data off - a Mac volume isn't sitting on the desktop). The TestDisk program can be used to scan a disk for partitions, and rebuild a partition table to match. If you've recently "deleted" partitions, it may find them. You have to be careful to check the results, before accepting them and updating the partition table. A copy of this may be on the Linux boot CD already. Versions are available for Windows as well. The main benefit to your situation, would be to see if a partition can be recognized. It takes a while to read the entire disk. (If you need to abort at any menu level, press control-C to quit. The last time I used it, not all menu levels had a quit command.) http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step Once you understand what is on the "good" disk, maybe then you'll be able to form a plan. If you make absolutely no progress via Linux, you can slave the "good" drive to another Windows PC. These are examples of scavenger programs, that might get some of your files back, by searching for fragments. This approach is reserved for times when the file system is toast, and you're trying to get what you can from the media. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec This copy is a backup version of a web site that has since disappeared. This software was eventually sold by the author, to another company as the basis of a commercial offering. At least one person has been able to get back files from an NTFS partition with it. Any number of $39.95 data recovery programs may do the same thing (some teasing you with a list of file names, before asking for the money). http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/Wou...rescue19d.html My guess would be, the array was in a "degraded" state from initial installation (one drive effectively failed or not mirroring at all), and the array was not rebuilt for some reason. Mirrors have two bad states. "Degraded" when one disk fails. "Failed" when two disks fail. One thing about RAID is, it should be thoroughly tested, before you use it for anything. Build your RAID 1 mirror. Put some test files on it. Disconnect one drive. Does the second drive work ? Now, security erase the second drive on another computer (so you can pretend it is a new replacement drive). Plug it in. Does the rebuild work properly ? Disconnect the other drive. Does the mirror work properly with just the "rejuvenated" drive ? Basically go through a sequence to prove the data is being transferred successfully in all cases, so you can trust the thing to work right on a failure. Basically, you become comfortable with the maintenance procedure as well, as there is no valuable data on the thing while you're testing. I've heard of this happening on a SIL3112 set up in RAID 1 mode. The user had a "degrade" one day, leaving the second disk as the only source of data. The data turned out to be three months stale, and all updates were lost for the last three months. Which means that SIL3112 based system, stopped mirroring for at least three months. The user appeared to be savvy enough, to know about array status, and claims there was no warning that the mirror was not working. So while he didn't lose all the data, effectively its the same as your case. The mirror wasn't working. And the software didn't say anything. It occurred to me at the time, that these mirrors really need a means of doing a verification some how, offline. Like, if the BIOS had a "check my mirror" command, you could leave it running overnight, verifying whether the sectors on both drives matched. But instead, the designers of this crap, have decided that a "rebuild" is how you assure yourself they're equal, which is not quite the same thing. I'd really want a means of checking for divergence, as a way of seeing how *well* the mirror is working. (If they don't match, you'd know there is a lack of functionality.) If the problem on your remaining disk was a corrupted MBR, then you could use "fixmbr" in a Windows environment. This article claims the command accepts a disk argument, so you should be able to fix more than one disk with it. http://pcsupport.about.com/od/termsf/p/fixmbr.htm Paul |
#3
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Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (v1.0) RAID-1 (mirrored) failed.
On Aug 19, 5:10*pm, Paul wrote:
Dave Pollum wrote: GA-EP45-DS3R v1.0 mobo. *Had 2x Seagate Barracuda SATA, 7200rpm 1,000GB (1TB). *I built a RAID-1 (mirroring) system using the RAID BIOS, because my PC _used_ to use a single non-RAID Seagate SATA drive, and that drive failed. *So I figured that I was safe with mirroring. When I booted up this morning, the BIOS showed that one of the RAID drives was bad and that the RAID volume had "failed". *I heard clicking maybe 4 times yesterday afternoon, but there was no notice that a drive was failing. I disconnected the bad drive, and tried to boot - BIOS can NOT find the boot loader on the good drive. *Thinking that when a RAID-1 drive goes bad all I have to do is replace it, so I bought a new Western Digital 1TB drive (I'm done with Seagates), and plugged it in place of the bad Seagate. *Still the PC won't boot. *If I want to create another RAID volume, it looks like the BIOS wants to erase my HD!! And it will do the same if I change from RAID to non-RAID. *I've got LOTS of important stuff on the RAID drives and I can't wipe the drives and start over. What do I do??? BTW -I'm on an old PC, that uses IDE, not SATA, drives -Dave Pollum Boot with another OS and do your forensics on it. I use the Linux LiveCD Knoppix from knopper.net, but there are probably others you could use. Ubuntu from ubuntu.com even. First check, would be to see if there are any partitions. Then try and mount them in Linux. Linux can now handle both FAT32 and NTFS, as well as EXT2 or EXT3 native formats. You can even mount Macintosh disks if you need to (but only to copy data off - a Mac volume isn't sitting on the desktop). The TestDisk program can be used to scan a disk for partitions, and rebuild a partition table to match. If you've recently "deleted" partitions, it may find them. You have to be careful to check the results, before accepting them and updating the partition table. A copy of this may be on the Linux boot CD already. Versions are available for Windows as well. The main benefit to your situation, would be to see if a partition can be recognized. It takes a while to read the entire disk. (If you need to abort at any menu level, press control-C to quit. The last time I used it, not all menu levels had a quit command.) http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step Once you understand what is on the "good" disk, maybe then you'll be able to form a plan. If you make absolutely no progress via Linux, you can slave the "good" drive to another Windows PC. These are examples of scavenger programs, that might get some of your files back, by searching for fragments. This approach is reserved for times when the file system is toast, and you're trying to get what you can from the media. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec This copy is a backup version of a web site that has since disappeared. This software was eventually sold by the author, to another company as the basis of a commercial offering. At least one person has been able to get back files from an NTFS partition with it. Any number of $39.95 data recovery programs may do the same thing (some teasing you with a list of file names, before asking for the money). http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/Wou...rescue19d.html My guess would be, the array was in a "degraded" state from initial installation (one drive effectively failed or not mirroring at all), and the array was not rebuilt for some reason. Mirrors have two bad states. "Degraded" when one disk fails. "Failed" when two disks fail. One thing about RAID is, it should be thoroughly tested, before you use it for anything. Build your RAID 1 mirror. Put some test files on it. Disconnect one drive. Does the second drive work ? Now, security erase the second drive on another computer (so you can pretend it is a new replacement drive). Plug it in. Does the rebuild work properly ? Disconnect the other drive. Does the mirror work properly with just the "rejuvenated" drive ? Basically go through a sequence to prove the data is being transferred successfully in all cases, so you can trust the thing to work right on a failure. Basically, you become comfortable with the maintenance procedure as well, as there is no valuable data on the thing while you're testing. I've heard of this happening on a SIL3112 set up in RAID 1 mode. The user had a "degrade" one day, leaving the second disk as the only source of data. The data turned out to be three months stale, and all updates were lost for the last three months. Which means that SIL3112 based system, stopped mirroring for at least three months. The user appeared to be savvy enough, to know about array status, and claims there was no warning that the mirror was not working. So while he didn't lose all the data, effectively its the same as your case. The mirror wasn't working. And the software didn't say anything. It occurred to me at the time, that these mirrors really need a means of doing a verification some how, offline. Like, if the BIOS had a "check my mirror" command, you could leave it running overnight, verifying whether the sectors on both drives matched. But instead, the designers of this crap, have decided that a "rebuild" is how you assure yourself they're equal, which is not quite the same thing. I'd really want a means of checking for divergence, as a way of seeing how *well* the mirror is working. (If they don't match, you'd know there is a lack of functionality.) If the problem on your remaining disk was a corrupted MBR, then you could use "fixmbr" in a Windows environment. This article claims the command accepts a disk argument, so you should be able to fix more than one disk with it. http://pcsupport.about.com/od/termsf/p/fixmbr.htm * * Paul Paul; UGH...lots of work. When booting my PC, I occasionally saw "rebuild" for the RAID's status. I assumed this meant things were working OK. Unfortunately, the EP45-DS3R manual (including the latest one on GA's website), only mentions how to set up their on-board RAID, not what to do if something goes wrong. So, I'm quite frustrated - I can't anything done (I freelance) until I get this %^&*#$ mess fixed. Would a separate RAID card be a better choice than the on-board RAID controller, and what would be a good choice? -Dave Pollum |
#4
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Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (v1.0) RAID-1 (mirrored) failed.
Dave Pollum wrote:
Paul; UGH...lots of work. When booting my PC, I occasionally saw "rebuild" for the RAID's status. I assumed this meant things were working OK. Unfortunately, the EP45-DS3R manual (including the latest one on GA's website), only mentions how to set up their on-board RAID, not what to do if something goes wrong. So, I'm quite frustrated - I can't anything done (I freelance) until I get this %^&*#$ mess fixed. Would a separate RAID card be a better choice than the on-board RAID controller, and what would be a good choice? -Dave Pollum Well, you're at the point of doing DIY data recovery, so yes, there is work and a learning curve. At this point, it is hard to tell how much trouble you're in. Maybe the only good copy of the data, is on the failed disk ? Some motherboard makers, include a copy of the Matrix Storage manual, on the motherboard CD. Sometimes you have to "explore" the CD, to find things like this. I have a few CDs here, where there is a "manuals" folder. This would be an example of an Intel manual. (I believe one of the older versions, had a pretty nice fault recovery section. Sometimes, when they rewrite these manuals, they throw out the good stuff and just leave the marketing fluff.) http://download.intel.com/support/ch...b/manual70.pdf "Degraded" and "failed" cases are described here, on web pages. This would be the main page for Matrix RAID at Intel. http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/ And there is a newer manual than the first link. I haven't flipped through the pages of this one yet. http://download.intel.com/support/ch...ers_manual.pdf ******* I think maybe a little philosophy is in order, before you decide what to do next. The purpose of RAID, is to allow maintenance on a computer to be put off until a more convenient time. As an example, say I have a company with 100 employees, and one volume of the RAID 1 dies at 2PM in the afternoon. Before the advent of RAID, the company would be at a standstill for three hours, until the disk is restored from tape and the server can be put online again. If that server had a RAID1, the array status goes to "degraded", and the remaining good disk captures all the transactions. The IT staff can wait until closing time, to install a replacement disk, and start the rebuild, to take the array from "degraded" to "fully operational" again. If a rebuild is done in the middle of the day, sometimes it sucks all the performance out of the server (I've experienced that at work - some rebuilds actually have a control that sets how much bandwidth is used for the rebuild). So the main purpose of RAID, is as a delaying tactic. So that on a long weekend, the company doesn't have to pay time and a half, for someone to come in and fix the equipment. It means maintenance can be scheduled, rather than being an instant disaster. So if that is the case, what is the missing element ? It is backups. Why would people with RAID equipment need backups ? Because *all* the equipment can fail in one shot. We had a couple complete failures in prime time at work. A *hardware* RAID controller, one of those expensive boards with its own processor, decided to write zeros over a critical portion of a RAID 5. Since all volumes were damaged at the same time, by that firmware bug, the staff had no choice but to restore from tape at 2PM in the afternoon. Since that server carried network licensed software, hundreds of staff could not work. My estimate, is the outage cost the company hundreds of thousands, as at least a few of the employees in question, would just walk out of the building. They wouldn't even stick around to see if the server would come back online. There are a few failure mechanisms, where *no* RAID is safe enough. For example, on your desktop computer right now, if the power supply 12V rail decides to output +15V for the next 30 seconds, *all* the disk drive motors would burn. Now, none of the disks on the computer work any more. How would a person protect themselves against such a failure ? Backups. (I actually got confirmation from one poster, that he had in fact experienced the overvoltage case, and had drives ruined by the power supply. So it does happen.) Then the question becomes, "so I gotta do backups, then what good is the RAID 1?". OK, what the RAID1 is buying you, is some degree of data redundancy. It is like an "extra backup", which most of the time, is going to be there for you. So the RAID1 can still have some value. But it should not be relied upon, to "cure cancer". It should not be your only asset. So, if you're going to use RAID... 1) Learn to use it. It doesn't matter if it is chipset RAID or hardware RAID. Like a fire drill, make a "pretend emergency" and repair it. That might even mean, having a spare disk handy, just like you'd need in a real emergency, and so on. Consider all the scenarios that should be tested. For the RAID1, that means simulating a drive failure, rebuilding to a new disk, pulling the old disk and verifying the data is still there on the rejuvenated disk. A RAID5 would have its own set of test cases and "fire drills". 2) Continue to do backups. If the computer is hit by lightning, is burned, overvolts on +12V, is hit by a virus and all files are erased, your "offline USB external" is what is going to get you up and running again. You also have more than one USB external, because some of those products are unreliable (check Newegg reviews for some examples). In terms of hardware RAID, the forums at 2cpu.com might have some discussions, or perhaps over on storagereview.com there might be something. I don't know how busy storagereview is these days. At least some people on 2cpu.com have tested a few different RAID controller boards. So you might see comments about Areca or LSI Logic and so on. You can also check reviews on Newegg, for the RAID cards, and maybe get some ideas there. Real RAID card testing takes months. So for someone reviewing a hardware card, it takes a while to test enough emergency conditions and the like, to develop an opinion about the product. To give an example, I've heard of the odd case, where a person installs a RAID5 with three disks. One disk fails, which in theory drops the array to "degraded". The array also happens to contain the boot partition. A few people have experienced a "failure" instead, where even though there are enough drives for the data to be available, the computer cannot boot. For some reason, if the array has four drives, the same problem doesn't seem to happen. You can imagine, it would take a lot of test cases, to get some feeling for how many quirks any product might have. HTH, Paul |
#5
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Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (v1.0) RAID-1 (mirrored) failed.
On Aug 19, 9:48*pm, Paul wrote:
Dave Pollum wrote: Paul; UGH...lots of work. When booting my PC, I occasionally saw "rebuild" for the RAID's status. *I assumed this meant things were working OK. *Unfortunately, the EP45-DS3R manual (including the latest one on GA's website), only mentions how to set up their on-board RAID, not what to do if something goes wrong. *So, I'm quite frustrated - I can't anything done (I freelance) until I get this %^&*#$ mess fixed. Would a separate RAID card be a better choice than the on-board RAID controller, and what would be a good choice? -Dave Pollum Well, you're at the point of doing DIY data recovery, so yes, there is work and a learning curve. At this point, it is hard to tell how much trouble you're in. Maybe the only good copy of the data, is on the failed disk ? Some motherboard makers, include a copy of the Matrix Storage manual, on the motherboard CD. Sometimes you have to "explore" the CD, to find things like this. I have a few CDs here, where there is a "manuals" folder. This would be an example of an Intel manual. (I believe one of the older versions, had a pretty nice fault recovery section. Sometimes, when they rewrite these manuals, they throw out the good stuff and just leave the marketing fluff.) http://download.intel.com/support/ch...b/manual70.pdf "Degraded" and "failed" cases are described here, on web pages. This would be the main page for Matrix RAID at Intel. http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/ And there is a newer manual than the first link. I haven't flipped through the pages of this one yet. http://download.intel.com/support/ch...raid_ahci_user... ******* I think maybe a little philosophy is in order, before you decide what to do next. The purpose of RAID, is to allow maintenance on a computer to be put off until a more convenient time. As an example, say I have a company with 100 employees, and one volume of the RAID 1 dies at 2PM in the afternoon. Before the advent of RAID, the company would be at a standstill for three hours, until the disk is restored from tape and the server can be put online again. If that server had a RAID1, the array status goes to "degraded", and the remaining good disk captures all the transactions. The IT staff can wait until closing time, to install a replacement disk, and start the rebuild, to take the array from "degraded" to "fully operational" again. If a rebuild is done in the middle of the day, sometimes it sucks all the performance out of the server (I've experienced that at work - some rebuilds actually have a control that sets how much bandwidth is used for the rebuild). So the main purpose of RAID, is as a delaying tactic. So that on a long weekend, the company doesn't have to pay time and a half, for someone to come in and fix the equipment. It means maintenance can be scheduled, rather than being an instant disaster. So if that is the case, what is the missing element ? It is backups. Why would people with RAID equipment need backups ? Because *all* the equipment can fail in one shot. We had a couple complete failures in prime time at work. A *hardware* RAID controller, one of those expensive boards with its own processor, decided to write zeros over a critical portion of a RAID 5. Since all volumes were damaged at the same time, by that firmware bug, the staff had no choice but to restore from tape at 2PM in the afternoon. Since that server carried network licensed software, hundreds of staff could not work. My estimate, is the outage cost the company hundreds of thousands, as at least a few of the employees in question, would just walk out of the building. They wouldn't even stick around to see if the server would come back online. There are a few failure mechanisms, where *no* RAID is safe enough. For example, on your desktop computer right now, if the power supply 12V rail decides to output +15V for the next 30 seconds, *all* the disk drive motors would burn. Now, none of the disks on the computer work any more. How would a person protect themselves against such a failure ? Backups. (I actually got confirmation from one poster, that he had in fact experienced the overvoltage case, and had drives ruined by the power supply. So it does happen.) Then the question becomes, "so I gotta do backups, then what good is the RAID 1?". OK, what the RAID1 is buying you, is some degree of data redundancy. It is like an "extra backup", which most of the time, is going to be there for you. So the RAID1 can still have some value. But it should not be relied upon, to "cure cancer". It should not be your only asset. So, if you're going to use RAID... 1) Learn to use it. It doesn't matter if it is chipset RAID or * * hardware RAID. Like a fire drill, make a "pretend emergency" * * and repair it. That might even mean, having a spare disk handy, * * just like you'd need in a real emergency, and so on. Consider * * all the scenarios that should be tested. For the RAID1, that means * * simulating a drive failure, rebuilding to a new disk, pulling the * * old disk and verifying the data is still there on the rejuvenated * * disk. A RAID5 would have its own set of test cases and "fire drills". 2) Continue to do backups. If the computer is hit by lightning, is burned, * * overvolts on +12V, is hit by a virus and all files are erased, your * * "offline USB external" is what is going to get you up and running * * again. You also have more than one USB external, because some of * * those products are unreliable (check Newegg reviews for some examples). In terms of hardware RAID, the forums at 2cpu.com might have some discussions, or perhaps over on storagereview.com there might be something. I don't know how busy storagereview is these days. At least some people on 2cpu.com have tested a few different RAID controller boards. So you might see comments about Areca or LSI Logic and so on. You can also check reviews on Newegg, for the RAID cards, and maybe get some ideas there. Real RAID card testing takes months. So for someone reviewing a hardware card, it takes a while to test enough emergency conditions and the like, to develop an opinion about the product. To give an example, I've heard of the odd case, where a person installs a RAID5 with three disks. One disk fails, which in theory drops the array to "degraded". The array also happens to contain the boot partition. A few people have experienced a "failure" instead, where even though there are enough drives for the data to be available, the computer cannot boot. For some reason, if the array has four drives, the same problem doesn't seem to happen. You can imagine, it would take a lot of test cases, to get some feeling for how many quirks any product might have. HTH, * * Paul Paul; Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience, and pointers to web sites. I really do appreciate it. If I sounded ungrateful it's because I'm really stressed out over this. Right now I've disabled mobo RAID and I'm running Seagate's SeaTools to make sure that the drives are actually readable. So hopefully I'll be able to get the data off of the drives. -Dave Pollum |
#6
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Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (v1.0) RAID-1 (mirrored) failed.
I don't know the direct answer to your question that you are looking
for, e.g. how to directly recover and boot from what you thought was a mirror of your hard drive, to get you instantly back to where you were. But some comments: WHAT I WOULD DO NOW: Connect the remaining supposedly good drive to another computer (either directly via SATA cable, or via USB to SATA converter (these are cheap, under $20). DO NOT TRY TO BOOT FROM THAT DRIVE, or do anything else what would write to it. See if you can access that drive. If so, copy your "stuff" from it to the other computer. If not .... there is a chance that it's truly gone forever. COMMENTS FOR THE FUTU I'm going to get a lot of flack on this, but in general, individual home users should forget about RAID. Period. Just forget about it. It's not worth the trouble and the hassle. RAID is for enterprise class servers using dedicated high-end RAID cards. It's not for desktop systems (ok, now you can flame me on this one). This is probably not news to you, but the importance of backups simply CAN NOT be overstated. Your problem is that you thought that what you were doing WAS an adequate backup. WRONG. For several reasons. First, there MUST be a backup EXTERNAL to the system being backed up. Obviously, even if it otherwise worked flawlessly, RAID is never a complete answer for this reason alone. Why? Because there are too many things (including, but not limited to both theft and power supply failures) that can result in the loss of everything within the physical computer box. Second, there must be a backup at a different physical location. Theft and fires happen. Not often, but they happen. Third (does not apply to you, but ....) Flash drives are not a safe backup media. Neither is any form of REWRITABLE optical media. Flash and rewritable media can lose their data for no apparent reason. It happens. I service computers and I teach computing at a local college. Believe me, data loss from these types of media happens. What I recommend: The primary drive(s) in the computer is a good quality SATA drive (my current recommendation is the 1TB Western Digital "Black" series of drive). DATA DOES NOT GO ON DRIVE C: !!! Drive C: is a relatively small (under 100GB) primary partition of the primary physical hard drive, but that drive has other partition(s) for data. [In my case, XP is on C:, Windows 7 is on D:, data, which is common to both OS', is on E: and F:] This is important; it means moving your "My Documents" folder to another drive, and configuring all of your programs to not store their data on drive C:. The only thing on drive C: is the operating system and installed PROGRAMS. Setting up your system in this manner greatly facilitates backup and recovery. The computer contains secondary drive(s) which are identical or similar hardware to the primary drive, used for ***MANUAL*** backup (e.g. drag and drop copying). It goes without saying that you have to remember to do this, periodically. In addition, I have an external USB hard drive that I also use as a backup, also manual, by copying critical files to it periodically. Finally, monthly, I make backups of my critical files to ONE-TIME optical media (I currently use dual layer DVD, I trust only Verbatim brand for dual-layer media). For the most part this contains changes and new files only. These are stored off-site (bank safe deposit box). About once a year I make a complete backup of pretty much everything. To facilitate recover of the OS or the hard drive itself, I have an "image backup" of Drive C: This is stored on the secondary hard drive within the computer, on the external hard drive, and it is also burned to DVD media stored off-site. I have found that this protocol provides a high level of safety from pretty much all of the bad things that could happen, and it's what I recommend to my students. Dave Pollum wrote: GA-EP45-DS3R v1.0 mobo. Had 2x Seagate Barracuda SATA, 7200rpm 1,000GB (1TB). I built a RAID-1 (mirroring) system using the RAID BIOS, because my PC _used_ to use a single non-RAID Seagate SATA drive, and that drive failed. So I figured that I was safe with mirroring. When I booted up this morning, the BIOS showed that one of the RAID drives was bad and that the RAID volume had "failed". I heard clicking maybe 4 times yesterday afternoon, but there was no notice that a drive was failing. I disconnected the bad drive, and tried to boot - BIOS can NOT find the boot loader on the good drive. Thinking that when a RAID-1 drive goes bad all I have to do is replace it, so I bought a new Western Digital 1TB drive (I'm done with Seagates), and plugged it in place of the bad Seagate. Still the PC won't boot. If I want to create another RAID volume, it looks like the BIOS wants to erase my HD!! And it will do the same if I change from RAID to non-RAID. I've got LOTS of important stuff on the RAID drives and I can't wipe the drives and start over. What do I do??? BTW -I'm on an old PC, that uses IDE, not SATA, drives -Dave Pollum |
#7
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Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (v1.0) RAID-1 (mirrored) failed.
Per Barry Watzman:
In addition, I have an external USB hard drive that I also use as a backup, also manual, by copying critical files to it periodically. What is your take on automating this process via something like SecondCopy? -- PeteCresswell |
#8
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Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (v1.0) RAID-1 (mirrored) failed.
I'm not a fan of it, but if you like it, fine. The important thing is
to have a backup. (PeteCresswell) wrote: Per Barry Watzman: In addition, I have an external USB hard drive that I also use as a backup, also manual, by copying critical files to it periodically. What is your take on automating this process via something like SecondCopy? |
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