HDD Failed :(

One of my mirrored 1TB SATA HDD has failed. It was just over a year old. The PC is now running on one drive. Have any of you guys had a similar experience? If so, how did you get the drive replaced and running as mirrored again? I assume it's just a matter of installing a new disk in and letting BIOS do it's thing, which could take a while due to the size of the drives. I've had drives failed at work but these were RAID 5 using hot swappable drives and an Adaptec controller. Replacement and rebuild was very straight forward. I on the other hand have RAID on the motherboard.

 

You could see if Spinright will help. I've heard it recommended/infomercialed a lot on the author's podcast Security Now

 

Surely the whole point of mirroring is that you can swap the drives when needed, is it not a case of simply plugging a new one in?

Also most drives have a five year warranty, so worth investigating.

 

One disk borked, no big problem the machine runs a bit slow for a while. Let us hope you have your data backed up somewhere else as you never know when the other disk will fail.

 

Yes, that is what I'd expect too but just asking if there is anything I should look out for.

The HDD has Maxtor badge but seems to have been manufactured by Seagate. I'll look into the warranty. It was purchased from one of Amazon's suppliers.

Yes, all data was/is backed up.

 

As most my work is domestic RAID mirroring is not something I have much experience with. However it should work fine with one single drive it should boot with all your data, you then have to use a utility to mirror the new drive.

Sadly as I found the hardware the BIOS does not mirror it, any change in two identical drives the operating system just crashes. I found this out when I had to slave two drives in a mirror to remove a rootkit.

Either way you won't have lost any data

Dev proper RAID mirroring like you get on servers and ones which come with cheap PC motherboards are completely different. i used to work for a company which designed such things and they cost £25,000 each, a motherboard cost £50-£100. Maybe some newer motherboards do support RAID hotswapping I am not sure

I will be interested to find out how you got on for my own research though . My SAMBA based backup system shall be running a RAID mirror once I get round to setting it up.

 

The problem is as mentioned above when I have tried it the PC motherboard dosn't seem to understand what to do when a drive has failed and been replaced However this was a 2004 board so hopefully things have improved.

Dev out of interest did you get any warning the drive was about to fail?

I am seeing a lot of drives failing now and I suspect there is more failure rates in larger capacity ones.

 

this is what I'm afraid of. I.e. is BIOS clever enough?

None. My PC hung and then wouldn't boot up. At the next reboot BIOS reported that RAID had deteriorated. I removed power from one HDD and got the message that there was no OS installed. Chenaged drives and it booted up fine. Windows still thinks I have working RAID.

I understand SATA are particularly prone to failure. They are meant to be cheap and cheerful. SCSI on the other hand...


are very expensive and have much lower capacity.

 

Just in case anyone is interested/curious, I bought another 1TB HDD (a Western Digital this time) and replaced it. On power on I saw and chose the option to repair the RAID, selected the correct master and hit the appropriate function key and booted up and carried on working, with BIOS doing it's repair in the background. After a few hours I rebooted again (when HDD light stopped flashing) and BIOS reported a healthy RAID.

BTW, I think it was a very good decision to order a different make for the second drive. It was fairly obvious to select the master from the BIOS menu. If the drives were the same it would've been much less obvious and potentially disasterous.

 

Good idea Dev Nothing worse when I am working on clients machine and having to slave a drive seeing a list of drives all the same make with similar model numbers.

I am pleased your BIOS worked as it should. I am consider getting a RAID for my system as although I do back up crucial stuff I am lazy and hard drive failure will mean I loose some none trivial stuff but things I still rather not loose.

I may get Windows 7 and just start the system from scratch with a RAID. It is also good to know it works with two different brands as I could then use my existing 500gb Seagate and then buy another 500GB drive of any make.

 

Thanks AT, but I only bought WD because a colleague recommended it, saying that he's seen and read about a high number of Seagate drive failures recently. He used to recommend Seagate but now thinks that their quality isn't as good as it used to be. I'm sure Lamboy will have a thing to say about it but in my case it was a big help.

 

Hi Dev,
Indeed Seagate did have a 'blip' - not a quality issue rather a design issue which was solved with some pain in the field. TBH all of the HDD mfg companies suffer some issue or another. As a rule of thumb always buy the drive with the highest capacity and lowest number of heads and platters. Eg, Seagate sell a 500GB 1 platter drive - its a beauty. (but then I would say that)

 

Thanks, I am going to buy a new drive on Monday but will just use backup software to mirror it all until I can get a RAID setup.

 

If Hdd is failed check following:
1. The first thing to check for is whether or not the hard disk can be seen by the hard disk controller.
2. f you can see the hard disk when you autodetect, the problem is more likely to be software than hardware. Remember that you cannot usually boot a brand new hard disk until it has been partitioned and formatted.
3. See if the disk will boot up.
4. If the drive will boot up, then you should be getting a more specific error message of some sort.
5. If the hard disk is dead and you have a concern about data on it,