Thank you Greg. Kind of terse, but I do fully comprehend your points. So
far, my data loss will be any/all digital pixs I took post 03/07 and some
archived dot-pdf files that support my home care equipment. Suspect that I
can probably find most of this again.
I never attempted to use the RAID of the server as a substitute for proper
backup policy. It just turned out the my server did have the largest
available free space (23GB). OK, shame on me. I do try to "backup" to
available space wherever available on my LAN clients until I can get a NAS
operational.
Is there some diagnostic app that I might use in the future to scan/check
the health of my RAID?
I have gone blind at the Adaptec site trying to find same that does not
rely on MS-DOS.
This may be the final push to look again at the server cases suggested by
Tim; and, just promote the RAID to SATA. More study to see if the old
server m/b and appliances can deal with this update.
Intel STL2, dual Intel P-3 1GHz, 2GB PC133 RAM.
Thank you,
Duncan
At 20:06 09/28/2008 -0500, you wrote:
Windows, or any other OS for that matter, will boot successfully from a
degraded array. Windows itself has no knowledge of the array being optimal,
degraded, or anything else--that's handled by the controller itself. The
operating system doesn't even know anything about the individual disks
attached, since again, it's all obfuscated by the controller's firmware.
My guess is that your bad drive has been going bad for a while, and has
caused some silent data corruption prior to fully kicking the bucket. Or,
the card itself is bad. Or, the driver is causing some problems as it deals
with/attempts to report the fault condition.
RAID is never a substitute for good backup procedures. RAID does nothing
more than increase availability (and performance, depending upon a number of
factors). It's no data-protection cure-all, as your situation may ultimately
reveal.
Greg
>
> I remain confused about why Windows will not complete a boot with a
> degraded raid as I've been told it should. Any ideas would be helpful.
> I
> am sure I followed all the proper steps when I rebuilt this server some
> time back.
>
> In the am I will begin the drive replacement business. Thank you for
> any
> suggestions.
> Duncan
