9 June 2008 - 12:05File Server Update

This is an update to my earlier filer posts (Part 1, Part 2), where I put together a windows server 2003 and set up a raid 5 array. Everything was working great for a long time, but as expected eventually a drive stopped working.

Not a problem the raid 5 array handled the failure without issue. What I suspect brought this on was a series of power failures one day. Along with the failed drive also came other issues. The primary ide controller on the motherboard no longer functioned, and I had to switch to the secondary just to boot the server.

Due to the lose of the ide controller, I had to remove the cdrom drive to put in a replacement drive. After that was done, I started resyncing the raid. All appeared to be going well until I took a look the next day and noticed the raid was still in a failed state. Taking a look at the replaced drive it was appearing as a 750GB drive. Since it was a 250GB drive I knew this wasn’t right. Checking out the drives properties revealed another issue. The system couldn’t read the drive information properly.

Great I thought, not only did the primary controller die, but the secondary controller slave isn’t working properly either. Signs to me that the motherboard cannot be trusted. I decided to swap out the motherboard from my desktop machine.

Of course the system didn’t boot, but performing an inplace reinstall, then plugging my raid drives back in brought everything back online. Not a single byte lost. I added the new drive to the raid 5 volume and started the resyncing process.

After a few hours all was well and I had a nice healthy file server.