Backup!

steve wrote in message ...
Tomorrow I go out and buy an external 160 GB drive and back up
EVERYTHING using something like NORTON GHOST, and return this dead
MAXTOR SATA drive (which by the way is less than 8 months old) and after
a complete backup to the external drive, I get to rebuild my raid
array.... somehow.


That's so bizarre... I was visiting my family recently when their
Maxtor died... and it was in a relatively new computer too. Hmmm...
now I'm glad I got them a Western Digital. If I hadn't been there it
would have been a painful case of phone support. They didn't even
have RAID, but hadn't had much time to put vital data on it yet
either.

The Mage

PS: Many sympathies for your experience.

In om,
TheMage typed...

steve wrote in message
...
Tomorrow I go out and buy an external 160 GB drive and back up
EVERYTHING using something like NORTON GHOST, and return this dead
MAXTOR SATA drive (which by the way is less than 8 months old) and
after a complete backup to the external drive, I get to rebuild my
raid array.... somehow.


That's so bizarre... I was visiting my family recently when their
Maxtor died... and it was in a relatively new computer too. Hmmm...
now I'm glad I got them a Western Digital. If I hadn't been there it
would have been a painful case of phone support. They didn't even
have RAID, but hadn't had much time to put vital data on it yet
either.

The Mage

PS: Many sympathies for your experience.


I purchased a new 40G Maxtor around two years ago.
It was the quietest, fastest HDD that I'd ever owned, it's also the only
hard drive that's ever failed me.

--
Bri.

Outstanding jp!

I am still scratching my head wondering how the RAID controller knows
how to partition and format the new replacement drive.... But I am not
going to worry about it if it works! (It is a mystery of modern
science... Like how my wife knows when I get a bonus at work and then
decides that we need to spend it on something irresponsible like the
house instead of running out and buying a long white lens)

MAxtor is shipping out a replacement drive and I will have to return the
old dead one in exchange or they will hit up my credit card.

I also just completed a complete backup of the data on my raid array to
a USB2 external drive. It took 3 attempts to get it right. Loooooong
attempts. I had to disable power saving features, norton antivirus
(which decided to launch a scheduled scan in the middle of a backup),
and a CD RW program that is unstable and decided to crash in the middle
of a backup.... Grrrrr I will have to do something about all of that. It
would be nice to have the backup work autonomously without having to
shut down all kinds of stuff that is normally running!

From the backup logs it looks like I might have to re-install norton
from the original CD if I were to do a disaster recovery using this
backup since one symantec dll file could not be backed up due to a
sharing violation.

Tomorrow I will create a disaster recovery bootable CD to allow the
machine to be booted and the restore to be launched.

All this work ..... It builds character I suppose!

Thanks for the assist!

Steve

jp wrote:

I have tested it by stopping the computer, disconnecting one drive to
simulate failure, restarted the computer and copyed files from one directory
to another etc on the remainig disk, stopped, reconnected and started again.
The RAID controller responded as described earlier, and in about an hour the
two disks were syncronized and running like they did before the test.

jpm




"steve" skrev i melding
...

The manual for the Intel RAID software that came with the controller
built into the motherboard is strangely silent on how to recover from a
drive failure. I read every page last night. Carefully.

I will back everything up to an external drive and try what you have
suggested. If I am lucky the controller will make my life much easier.

If not, it is beginning to look like a pretty ugly process.

Do you have first hand experience performing a recovery of this nature
with this controller? I would greatly appreciate some tips if the answer
is yes!


Regards,

Steve


Jan-Petter Midtgård wrote:

"steve" skrev i melding
...


Agreed.

I have read the minimal manual that Intel provides for the ICH5R RAID
controller in this 875P motherboard chipset. There appears to be ZERO
support from Intel other than the manual. I suppose this is typical for
an OEM product. Comes with the territory.

From reading the manual for the RAID chipset it appears that I can
re-create the RAID 1 ARRAY as follows:

1. Backup everything (O/S, and Data, all partitions) to an additional
bootable hard drive. In other words make a bootable image of everything
on the RAID. (I sure hope Ghost can do this, and I believe it probably

can.)


2. Delete the raid volume (This step destroys all data including the O/S
on the working RAID drive)

3. Boot to the backup drive, and launch the Intel data migration tool.

4. Create a new RAID 1 volume using the tool, which will migrate
everything from the backup drive to the new RAID volume.



That sounds like the thing to do if you were migrating from non-RAID to
RAID.

You already had a RAID 1 array, and should only need to plug in the new

disk

and let the ICH5R do its magic by copying everything from the old
functioning drive to the new one.

If you have installed the "Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition",

a

message wil pop up from the lower right corner of the screen, showing

how

things are progressing. Synchronizing big disks may take several hours.

jpm

Funny you should mention Maxtor drives failing.

While I was on the phone with the Maxtor tech support guy working out
the warranty exchange, I could not resist asking if there was a known
issue with this model drive as I am aware of more than a few failures.
Having no way of knowing how many are out in circulation I cant be sure
there is a systemic problem, but in the future I will think twice before
buying another maxtor SATA drive.

Maxtor's rep was sympathetic but would only offer a comment akin to
'poop happens'. Probably all that I should expect given that they record
all the calls -- I decided it wasn't a good idea to tear into him as he
didn't design the darn thing in the first place. (Not to mention that it
isnt a good policy to **** off someone who you are expecting to handle a
job for you!) However I might slip a note into the return drive shipment
explaining how disappointed I am in the poor reliability of the drive.

This is the first 'modern' drive that has ever failed on me. The old
'shoebox sized' 20 meg drive I had in my XT machine doesnt count! It was
a piece of bronze-age art.

I also remember a guy in the computer store shaking his head and warning
me when I purchased the pair of maxtor SATA drives 8 months ago. He
strongly felt that that was a brand / model to avoid like the plague,
but he was just a customer and everyone has an opinion don't they.

Well, since I don't know the fellow I wont have to say 'you were
right!', but he ought to be picking lotto numbers.

Steve



Bri. wrote:

In om,
TheMage typed...


steve wrote in message
...

Tomorrow I go out and buy an external 160 GB drive and back up
EVERYTHING using something like NORTON GHOST, and return this dead
MAXTOR SATA drive (which by the way is less than 8 months old) and
after a complete backup to the external drive, I get to rebuild my
raid array.... somehow.


That's so bizarre... I was visiting my family recently when their
Maxtor died... and it was in a relatively new computer too. Hmmm...
now I'm glad I got them a Western Digital. If I hadn't been there it
would have been a painful case of phone support. They didn't even
have RAID, but hadn't had much time to put vital data on it yet
either.

The Mage

PS: Many sympathies for your experience.



I purchased a new 40G Maxtor around two years ago.
It was the quietest, fastest HDD that I'd ever owned, it's also the only
hard drive that's ever failed me.

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 22:51:48 -0700, steve
wrote:

Tomorrow I go out and buy an external 160 GB drive and back up
EVERYTHING using something like NORTON GHOST, and return this dead
MAXTOR SATA drive (which by the way is less than 8 months old) and after
a complete backup to the external drive, I get to rebuild my raid
array.... somehow.

I'd recommend trying Acronis True Image 7 (www.acronis.com) as an
imaging program. I like it a *lot* more than Ghost. Fast, friendly,
very easy to use, doesn't require rebooting to DOS, does incremental
backups, and is very non-intrusive. It's less tweakable than Ghost,
but if you don't want to fiddle around a lot, it's a revolutionary
improvement in disk imaging. Restores are very quick and easy as
well.

Someone mentioned Second Copy, from www.centered.com, which is also a
great file backup program if you don't want to image an entire HD. I
use both; TI7 to backup my boot drive and my docs/photos drive, and
Second Copy to back up just MP3s from my huge media drive (I don't
bother with videos and archives of stuff I can get again easily).

This protects from HD failure, but not from burglars, if they steal
your backup drive. With TI7, I image it all to an external drive with
the images split in 4.5G chunks (one full, 6 incrementals per week).
Once a month or so, I'll dump the images onto DVDs, which go into the
safe, or can go off-site if you want fire protection. When I go out
of town, I stick the external drive in the safe as well. This also
lets you have multiple versions of backups, so even if you lose both
HDs at once, you're only out the new data since your last DVD copy.


--
Neil Maxwell - I don't speak for my employer