Tuesday, January 8, 2008

HighPoint RaidRocket 454 problem and solution

The other day, I got awaken by the dreaded beep of the RAID controler on my home server. One of the disk had failed. Not a problem I thought, RAID5 is supposed to cope with such issues. I launched the RAID management interface to know more about the problem, and clicked on Rescan. The computer seemed frozen for a minute or so, and the beep stopped. Afterwards, the failed disk got recognized again... until I clicked on rescan a second time. Big mistake. Two disks got flagged as failed and the array got disabled... After a reboot, the array was split in 2 identical arrays (same size, same name) but one with the first 6 disks, the other with the failed 2, both disabled. Only option presented by the RAID BIOS (hpt374): delete array. Not en option, as I didn't have any backup of that storage...
So, I stopped the computer and emailed the support, without much hope. To my great pleasure, I got a reply back, with a tool that would allow me to reconfigure the array as one entity, and access it again. And it worked :-)
So, I must say I'm very happy with Highpoint support, their answer was fast, precise and to the point. I already had issues with a Promise item and received nothing valuable from their support (asked to reboot and closed the call)...
Two thumbs up to Highpoint support!

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