RAID Failure

[seanf]

I installed the QuickTime update last night and rebooted my Mac Pro and everything was fine. I then tried to run Parallels and got an error and remembered other people saying they were able to resolve this by putting the Mac to sleep, waking it and then running parallels again. I tried this, but when parallels started the system completely locked up - stuck beach ball, could not access any menus, etc. I left it for a while, but this made no difference, so held the power button until the Mac Pro switched off. When I turned it back on no Apple logo appeared on the loading screen and it would not boot. I tried turning the power off and on and then a very faint beeping was coming from the internal speaker. I then heard repeated read noises coming from my first drive, so decided to remove this. The computer then booted successfully (second hard drive is mirrored), but was slower than usual. The S.M.A.R.T. status of all three drives was verified, but disk utility showed the first drive in the RAID as failed. I tired rebuilding the RAID, but just got a beach ball and nothing else. I rebooted and went back into Disk Utility and OS X started rebuilding the RAID automatically. This took about 90 minutes, but completed successfully and the RAID now shows as online again.

Should I be worried that the RAID failed or should I pay more attention to the reported S.M.A.R.T. status of the drives? Has anyone ever experienced this before?

Thanks

Sean

 

[seanf]

Hmmm, everything seems to be OK after rebuilding the RAID and verifying it showed no problems. I have noticed that OS X shows the connection type as External for the RAID, is this normal?

Thanks

Sean

 

[jlmodell]

Hmmm, everything seems to be OK after rebuilding the RAID and verifying it showed no problems. I have noticed that OS X shows the connection type as External for the RAID, is this normal?

Thanks

Sean

I got the same error, the same exact way yesterday. I lost a bunch of data - thank god I didnt delete all of my work off my external backup so I wasn't too far behind. Mine didn't try rebuilding right away, can't remember If i tried it or not, I just started over from scratch.

What i'm wondering is if I ever have a kernel panic or something again (well you can't plan for them..) will my raided drives corrupt themselves again?

((Don't know why I tried out an old parallels when I already read it wouldn't work with the mac pro...))

Mine doesnt seem to be labeled as external ' http://gorkd.com/raid.png '

 

[seanf]

The same thing has happened today

I have managed to get back into OS X with one of the drives removed, but get a kernel panic when trying to rebuild the RAID. I'm currently backing up and will reinstall to see if this makes any difference. I imagine I will be running without RAID though, as I can't have it failing every time something unexpected happens within OS X.

Have you had any problems since jlmodell? How have you got yours setup? I have two Seagate drives mirrored.

Sean

 

[seanf]

After the backup I booted into Windows and run the Seagate diagnostic tools, which showed one of my drives has failing sectors - this was not picked up by OS X or Windows. I'll be sending both drives back and replacing them with the same model Western Digital drive Apple shipped me and see if I can get a stable RAID solution.

Sean

 

[RedTomato]

*** makes note to self- must remember to test my RAID in failure mode - don't want to be stumbling in dark when a disk fails like the above posters.. ***