Problem with my Raid 0

Redhairedguy

Hi Guys,

Think I might have buggered my Xstore Studio Raid 5-Te enclosure (5TB). Usually this is being used for Video Editing (s'what I do), but for the last 3 months it's been sitting idle in a box whilst I was doing another job that required less kit. Plugged it back into my tower yesterday in the hopes that it would just pop up, but it didn't. Foolish me decided to have a tinker and see why it wouldn't mount.

Accidently changed it from one disc to 10 simple basic drives. (Five 932GB partions, and five 31MB partitions;) Didn't format anything, because it's full and I didn't want to lose anything. To make matters worse, I then went and tried to change it to a dynamic disc, which allocated 4 of the drives letters and popped them up as RAW file systems.

So question one; is there anyway to fix this and get it back as one RAID 0 drive again, and question two; have I inadvertently wiped the whole bleedin' thing?

Can't find much info online, so I'm completely lost.

Thanks.

RHG

ZENER

Just curious how Windows could even see the drives ? Doesn't the RAID Box present all 5 disks as a single disk which is accessed via SMB or CIFS or does this box do something special like FCoE or iSCSI or something other than SMB ?

The XTore would have formatted the disks with a Unix Filesystem which is transparent to the OS as you're just accessing a share over Ethernet. The RAID is internal to the box so how does Windows see the 5 disks ? Or am I missing something ?

When access the Web GUI for the box what does it say about the storage used/available ?

Ken

Redhairedguy

ZENER wrote: »

Just curious how Windows could even see the drives ? Doesn't the RAID Box present all 5 disks as a single disk which is accessed via SMB or CIFS or does this box do something special like FCoE or iSCSI or something other than SMB ?

The XTore would have formatted the disks with a Unix Filesystem which is transparent to the OS as you're just accessing a share over Ethernet. The RAID is internal to the box so how does Windows see the 5 disks ? Or am I missing something ?

When access the Web GUI for the box what does it say about the storage used/available ?

Ken

Hi ZENER,

Thanks for the reply. Usually the RAID would present everything as one drive, but after I (foolishly) tinkered with it, the drives then popped up as 5 separates, complete with two partitions each. (See below pic)



The RAID is connected directly to the back of my tower (HP Z420) via SAS cable between the Xtore and the LSI-9200 card installed into one of the PCI slots of my tower. The Xtore box hasn't had an ethernet plugged into the back of it for as long as I've had it; It was in use by someone else before I was given it, so would have been initialised then.

I also installed the ATTO config tool which identifies the 5 bay chassis along with the 5 drives which you can see here.




In terms of the web GUI, it doesn't say anything about storage used/available. It just shows the drives as below



No matter what I do, I can't seem to build the RAID again, or the Logical Volume and it just keeps coming up with an error. I'm hesitant to try striping the drives through computer management and going from there, because something tells me I should be doing it all through the Xtore GUI.

I'm a complete amateur when it comes to things of this ilk, so apologies if this info is useless.

Thanks

RHG

SterlingArcher

Post also in pc building upgrading.

ED E

From your description it sounds like you haven't written anything to any of the disks, just allowed windows to see them by dropping them into JBOD mode.

If the data is important the first thing you should do is image all the disks to duplicates, then you try rebuilding with copies not the originals.


Due to the LSI card internally I'd assume the enclosure has always just presented a JBOD and the array is onboard. You need to use the LSI firmware or LSI software to rebuild the volume. There should be a message to hit "key x + key y" when you boot the system to enter LSI Megaraid or similar, do that.

SterlingArcher wrote: »

Post also in pc building upgrading.

Duping is against the rules, mods can move it if needs be.

SterlingArcher

ED E wrote: »

From your description it sounds like you haven't written anything to any of the disks, just allowed windows to see them by dropping them into JBOD mode.

If the data is important the first thing you should do is image all the disks to duplicates, then you try rebuilding with copies not the originals.


Due to the LSI card internally I'd assume the enclosure has always just presented a JBOD and the array is onboard. You need to use the LSI firmware or LSI software to rebuild the volume. There should be a message to hit "key x + key y" when you boot the system to enter LSI Megaraid or similar, do that.




Duping is against the rules, mods can move it if needs be.

Haha I ment move. Funnily enough I know you a dab hand at this topic. thought you might see it quicker over there

Redhairedguy

SterlingArcher wrote: »

Post also in pc building upgrading.

Yeah. Cool. If mods think I might get more help over in Building & Upgrading, please move it there. :pac:

Redhairedguy

Alright. Back to it since 9 this morning, and I've moved the Xtore into another editing suite in the building, tried on a different tower with a built in SAS port, and I'm coming across the exact same problem, so I don't think it's anything to do with my LSI card.

In the web GUI the Xtore says that the drives are there and are online, yet when I create a new RAID and Logical volume, it fails, and pops up an error. Unfortunately, it's no longer allowing me to even delete the RAID or stop the logical volume. It seems that every step forward I get knocked back two... :rolleyes:

Part of me thinks to go ahead and stripe the drives through computer management, because I'm now at the stage where I don't even care about the media on it, and just want to get the RAID working again; but a colleague of mine thinks that it should all be done through the Xtore web GUI... I am lost!

ED E

I was wrong before the 9200 is a HBA not a raid card so using the XTORE as your RAID controller could be the original approach.

Serephucus

Have you tried what ED suggested? Pretty sure that enclosure uses a 8-port 9200 internally, so you could try sticking that into your machine, then configuring the volume at boot using LSI's utility. Sounds like that's what the software you're using is expecting.

Edit: Ninja'd by ED. He's right. Never mind me.