RAID5 Help

[thelazyone]

The company that I work for had their IT guy quit so for now I'm in charge of handling everything. We have a network drive that runs on RAID5 with 4 750gb hard drives and using the SATARAID5 Array Manager.

The drive would randomly become unavailable until restarted and now it doesn't show up at all. When I log into the computer, the manager shows Channel 2 as empty.

What can I do to make the drive visible again? And if I disable the RAID and just use the hard drives individually, will I lose data?

 

[Aastii]

First of all what operating system are these running on?

Secondly, do not get rid of the RAID array. The way that RAID 5 works is to split data across multiple drives with parity (error checking. It allows for data to be recovered if drives fail), so to split them would potentially ruin the data.

Thirdly, do you know which drives are being used in the system?

It sounds like either a software issue, either with the OS or with the array software, which would potentially be easily fixed, or that particular drive is going bad, which would require a replacement. Bare in mind as well that if this system or all of the drives were bought at the same time, chances are the remaining drives could potentially be somewhere near the end of their lives as well. There is also the chance that the RAID controller itself is on the blink, but as it is only one drive I doubt that.

 

[thelazyone]

Running Windows XP.

There is a Group 0 Legacy error in the Event Log.

The manager is showing information on the first 2 drives, but I have no way of seeing the files. The third and forth drives were left empty, but now the third drive doesn't show up at all.