Update To Broken Raid

Image by Jemimus via FlickrBy The Computer Doctor

So I took a couple of weeks to go over the problem of my RAID disks being offline or half online or ready but no logical discs ect.

My Failure In Understandings:

• I thought that all 6 drives were the same size, but there were three 9 Gb drives and three 25 Gb drives so I will not be able to have more than three discs in my logical drive
• I thought that I should be able to configure these RAID arrays from the BIOS or from inside Server 2003 which would be software RAID instead of Hardware RAID

My Confusion In Research:
I had three items that came up during boot time and I didn't know which one I needed to learn about to fix my problem.

• CH B, SCSI ID: 6 COMPAQ SDT-10000 this was a SCSI zip drive. Irrelevant!
• Adaptec AIC-7896 this is the card that the hot swap drives plug into. Still not helpful
• IBM ServeRaid 3h this is the huge almst 20 inches long card that actually controlled all the SCSI items. I needed a live cd from IBM to set this up and now I finally found the component that fixed my problem.

I can't stress enough that Google is your best friend, or as my friend Fred commonly mis-quotes me "Everyone likes Google".

My next problem is I am commonly getting a server management controller error. I'm not that worried though because this is the server that gave the school so many fits to start with, it was free to me and I know that it can probably be fixed given enough research.

Broken RAID

By The Computer Doctor

Finally, the moment I've been waiting for, I have my first server.

As many of you who have followed me over the past year know, I inherited five servers from a school who just closed and have been storing them at my friend Fred's house ( see Holy Man Or Hallucinating Ham for the incredible story of Fred laying on of hands ). So I finally picked up the first of those servers to set up at my house and promptly ran into problems.

We started out with a three disc RAID5 logical disc with 17.8 usable GB. I installed sever 2003 and got all the updates. When I got home I did some investigating and found another logical disc with 69.3 GB offline that was available so I promptly brought it online. Finally I decided to try to merge the two logical discs for one combined 6 disc raid array which would probably have given me roughly a 92 GB logical drive.

Now the first 17 GB logical drive is offline and one of the other disc's read critical and I am having to re-install Server 2003. Now it dawns on me that this might be the same server that kept giving the school all the problems in the first place.

So in addition to finishing up preparations for the studio I am having to learn all about this RAID controller to try to repair it.

CALLING ALL GEEKS AND HACKERS: If anyone knows anything about a Adaptec AIC-7896 RAID controller, send me a comment or use the contact us page at the top. I will be researching this on my own until someone helps me, I find the answer or I get tired and move on to a different server.