RAID5 Hijinks

[Systems_Admin6]

One of the SCSI hard drives in our server's RAID5 array failed the other day. Pity, since it wasn't even a year old. Everything kept working as it should, and it took about 3 days to get a replacement drive. We're pretty small, so I didn't have the budget for a hot-swap spare or an extra drive. Of course, after rebuilding I'm getting 'bad stripes' reports. Normally I'd complain that I have to wipe and rebuild the entire array, but at least I still seem to have access to all of my data...

But now I can't back it up with BESR. I started getting 'bad sector' errors when the drive failed, which was understandable, but meant I couldn't do a backup since Mar. 30th. Now that I've replaced the drive, I hoped to be able to get a newer backup. Nope, same bad sector error. In reading some old threads I see that the 'PartInNT' program can tell you what's wrong, but can it fix or bypass the errors? CHKDSK doesn't do anything, of course, and I've tried disabling bad sector checking and SmartSector copying to no avail. The backup starts and gets to 5%... and there it stays.

I'm doing an XCopy of the drive now, and I'll probably have to rebuild everything manually over the Holiday. But does anyone have any suggestions for BESR?

[Bill_Felt]

Hello,

No, the PartinNT.exe program will do nothing with bad sectors.  It deals with identifying and troubleshooting partition table errors, which is a very different problem than sectors on a disk starting to fail.

My suggestion was going to be to have you try checking the option to ignore bad sectors, but you've obviously tried that.

Does the program actually error out and complain about bad sectors (I believe you said it does), or does it just seem to hang at around 5%?  What do the BESR logs say is happening?

Can you cut and paste the error from the BESR log file into this thread?

[Systems_Admin6]

Sorry. Wasn't used to anyone actually reading these, so I stopped checking back after a week.

The error it was giving was that it couldn't properly read data in a sector, and this continued after I had repaired the array. This gave me the impression that it was sector copying rather than file copying. Without recent backups, I didn't dare do a full rebuild on the array, but I ran ScanDisk/Chkdsk on it a few times which seemed to put the sector data in order. The BESR error vanished and it began to perform backups again.

[Bill_Felt]

Hello,

I'm glad to see you were able to correc the issue.

Thanks.