Drive failed - array is gone :/

[khariv]

I'm running a netcell 3 Port SATA card with 3 200g drives in Raid 3 on an old server. About a week ago, one of the drives started making really bad noises and on server reboot the entire array was gone.

At present, using either the BIOS utility or the netcell windows util, I can only see 2 drives (3rd drive had to be unplugged). The problem is the card is no longer seeing an array at all. I can select the 2 drives to "Create" an array, but the only option it has is to use Raid 0 or Raid 1. The util does say that there may be data on the drives, so they're not totally gone.

So, the question I have is, how do I recreate the array at least long enough to pull my data off of the drives? Do I have to go out and track down another 200g SATA drive to stick into the array and hope that it can magically re-create it?

The whole reason I was even using RAID was to guard against drive failure, but now a drive has failed and my array went poof.

Update:

In the BIOS configuration utility it is showing my 2 drive as U (Unassigned). One is plain U and the other is U# - Partial array. Does this mean that it's not seeing the partial array data on the 2nd drive?


Any suggestions?

thanks

[Tony Sleep]

DON'T reinitialise nor try to create a RAID 0 or 1 array using just the remaining 2 disks, as that will lose data. Replace your failed drive with one of at least the same size as the one that's broken, then use the BIOS to create a RAID3 array. You should not lose any data, and the array should then proceed to rebuild.

I've found Netcell cards are pretty smart at sorting out damaged and disrupted arrays providing you give them a chance.

Of course, RAID is no excuse for not having backups. Fault tolerant doesn't mean fault immune

[ericbsmith]

+1 what Tony said.

I haven't had to replace a failed drive yet, but I did have some experience with a drive dropping from an existing array and it causing the array to degrade during rebuild. Deleting the existing array and recreating it (with the same exact settings) always preserved the data; I'd imagine the same would happen if you replace the dead drive then recreate the RAID-3 array.