Patience, part II
Recently I've blogged about upgrading my mother's computer, which required a great deal of patience.
Even more patience is required when trying to fix the server at Ele's work.
They have a single server, with a 2-disk RAID1 array. This means all the data is written to both hard drives at the same time, giving them fault tolerance in the event of a disk failure. They were getting a lot of server crashing, so I went in to have a look. Sure enough, one of the drives had failed. I did a verification on it and it passed, so I tried to rebuild the drive from the other one. This failed.
At this point I gave up and ordered another identical drive to replace it. This arrived the next day, so I went back to her office, installed it and tried to rebuild again. This also failed. This was now a rather bigger problem. After a lot of searching around on t'internet, I discovered that this exact model of drive is basically incompatible with the RAID controller (which is also pretty rubbish, according to most reports). Great. It was a miracle it's lasted this long. FYI Western Digital SATA drives with a serial number ending in JD are not compatible with an Adaptec 1210SA RAID controller. It's due to a retry mechanism in the drive that causes a timeout on the RAID card, apparantly.
So, the next day I hot-footed it to PC-World after work to see what I could get there. They had some Hitachi drives and nothing else. I was really after Seagate, but was wanting to get the server fixed quickly, as it's harming their business a bit. So I bought 2 Hitachi drives, with the intention of rebuilding to one drive, then ripping out the remaining WD one and rebuilding back to the second Hitachi.
So I put the first one in, the RAID BIOS saw it fine, initialised it, booted to Windows, ran the Adaptec Storage Manager program (getting hold of that is hard enough if you don't know the serial number of your card!) and it didn't appear there.
A lot more searching revealed that that drive, too, is not compatible with this card. Great. Out of all the drives in the world, I had managed to buy the only two that don't work. So now we've ordered the Seagate ones and tonight I'm going to try again. But I'm still not convinced that the problem doesn't lie with the remaining WD drive meaning that tonight's rebuild will also fail. If it does, we're basically reduced to re-installing Windows, unless I can do something tricky by breaking the RAID, putting the WD drive into my own computer, ghosting it to an image, ghosting that back to a Seagate drive and rebuilding a RAID from that one.
Fun times. At least I'm getting paid for it!
Even more patience is required when trying to fix the server at Ele's work.
They have a single server, with a 2-disk RAID1 array. This means all the data is written to both hard drives at the same time, giving them fault tolerance in the event of a disk failure. They were getting a lot of server crashing, so I went in to have a look. Sure enough, one of the drives had failed. I did a verification on it and it passed, so I tried to rebuild the drive from the other one. This failed.
At this point I gave up and ordered another identical drive to replace it. This arrived the next day, so I went back to her office, installed it and tried to rebuild again. This also failed. This was now a rather bigger problem. After a lot of searching around on t'internet, I discovered that this exact model of drive is basically incompatible with the RAID controller (which is also pretty rubbish, according to most reports). Great. It was a miracle it's lasted this long. FYI Western Digital SATA drives with a serial number ending in JD are not compatible with an Adaptec 1210SA RAID controller. It's due to a retry mechanism in the drive that causes a timeout on the RAID card, apparantly.
So, the next day I hot-footed it to PC-World after work to see what I could get there. They had some Hitachi drives and nothing else. I was really after Seagate, but was wanting to get the server fixed quickly, as it's harming their business a bit. So I bought 2 Hitachi drives, with the intention of rebuilding to one drive, then ripping out the remaining WD one and rebuilding back to the second Hitachi.
So I put the first one in, the RAID BIOS saw it fine, initialised it, booted to Windows, ran the Adaptec Storage Manager program (getting hold of that is hard enough if you don't know the serial number of your card!) and it didn't appear there.
A lot more searching revealed that that drive, too, is not compatible with this card. Great. Out of all the drives in the world, I had managed to buy the only two that don't work. So now we've ordered the Seagate ones and tonight I'm going to try again. But I'm still not convinced that the problem doesn't lie with the remaining WD drive meaning that tonight's rebuild will also fail. If it does, we're basically reduced to re-installing Windows, unless I can do something tricky by breaking the RAID, putting the WD drive into my own computer, ghosting it to an image, ghosting that back to a Seagate drive and rebuilding a RAID from that one.
Fun times. At least I'm getting paid for it!
posted by Nej at
2:31 pm
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