Recovering from a RAID Controller Failure

There are many reasons why a RAID goes down.  A technician will normally assume that one or more of the drives have failed.  This is a common diagnosis as the diagnostic lights on each of the drives may be blinking, the lights may have gone amber, or... 

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RAID 5 Stale drive detection

Over the course of a week I receive several calls regarding the recovery of a RAID 5 array. In the course of the initial interrogation of a client I ask several questions regarding the state of the array, what has been done to recover the array and most... 

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Network Attached Storage NAS and Other Nightmares

Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices have been a boon for storage technology.  What a great windfall for the industry.  Grab yourself an Open Source operating system, stick it on a prom, get yourself an inexpensive motherboard, some hard drives and... 

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Recovering a badly fragmented Outlook PST file after a few rounds with chkdsk The Final Installment

Welcome back!  As before, we still have the problem where chkdsk was run on a RAID with a stale drive.  We have had a brief explanation of how NTFS 5 works and how the data is stored on the volume.  Lets take a much more detailed look as to how the... 

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RAID Explained in Simple Terms

I find that “RAID” is such a scary term to a lot of my end users or business clients who are not Network Admin’s. A RAID is in it’s simplest form more then one “physical” (physical means the actual device you would... 

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End User Raid Zero Array Crash

I had a client call me the other day and tell me that her two year old two terabyte drive had crashed and all of her pictures of her children, as well as her wedding were on the drive. She did not have a backup and was very upset. I knew that there was... 

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When good RAIDs Go Bad, A Technicians Worst Nightmare

The next machine with a bad hard drive was my server. This server has been running as a server in our home for about 8 years. HAH! Now that is not to say that we haven’t done upgrades, because we have. We have always kept the “data” area of the... 

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Use Bad Block Frequency to determine RAID 5 stale drive

We have been discussing the love affair I have with stale drives in a RAID five array and how best to determine if in fact one exists. I explained how the NTFS file system data is normally laid out and the fact the old and new data, as well as how... 

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RAID Configuration and Parity Check

The function set for the inaugural offering of RAID Diagnostic Toolkit is very basic. This post will explain how to choose a set of ’streams’ to build a ‘RAID set’. Initially the software does not have any options for stripe size,... 

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