raid screwed?

[newfoundglory]

Okay, well, I have a rather strange problem

Today my mac stopped working - appeared frozen at the login screen. Would not accept keyboard input. Could ping it on the network, but not access it remotely (ARD or SSH etc)

So had to hard reboot.

This Mac has 3 HDDs in RAID5 with an Apple RAID card. The raid card presents a single volume to the system.

Anyway, I now get flashing folder with question mark on startup.

Booted from Mac OS X 10.5 Server DVD. Disk utility cannot see any volumes at all apart from the DVD drive. But, RAID utility reports a healthy all-green RAID card and raid set.

What should I try next?

 

[nanofrog]

Sounds like software issues (i.e. lost the RAID card driver, or there's corruption).

You can try and re-install the RAID drivers (even try to repair permisions, particularly due to the forced shutdown), but it may take a clean OS installation to fix.

Worst case, you'll need to restore the entire system, so I hope you have the necessary backups on hand.

 

[ListedFirst.com]

Okay, well, I have a rather strange problem

Today my mac stopped working - appeared frozen at the login screen. Would not accept keyboard input. Could ping it on the network, but not access it remotely (ARD or SSH etc)

So had to hard reboot.

This Mac has 3 HDDs in RAID5 with an Apple RAID card. The raid card presents a single volume to the system.

Anyway, I now get flashing folder with question mark on startup.

Booted from Mac OS X 10.5 Server DVD. Disk utility cannot see any volumes at all apart from the DVD drive. But, RAID utility reports a healthy all-green RAID card and raid set.

What should I try next?

Yikes! I hope you have a time machine backup, The only thing I can think of would be to power off completely, UNplug the RAID card battery and wait a few minutes, then power back up. If that doesn't work, the next step would be to delete and re-create the array, see if it appears back in disk utility.

I personally use teh Areca 1880ix-12 and have had nothing but absolute perfection (and 4x the speed).

Good luck!

 

[Riot Nrrrd]

Here I am with a 4x2 TB Mac Pro + Apple RAID card considering doing a 4-disk RAID5 setup ... you're giving me the heebie-geebies man!

(If you *do* rescue it, I'd put a separate boot disk in the 4th tray - assuming you don't already have one in there - or in the 2nd optical drive bay. I'm going SSD for that - as soon as I can make up my damn mind which SSD to buy!)