RAID failure help

[John Costello]

On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Toby Corkindale wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 10:46:21AM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote:
> > A friend of mine is having problems with his RAID 5 set up at home which 
> > uses a  Adaptec SATA RAID 2810SA
> > 
> > http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/raid/sata/AAR-2810SA/
> > 
> > 
> > "going in via the card bios on boot shows all four
> > drives are physically detectable and present. running the "verify disk
> > media" diagnostic (from within card bios disk utilities) scanned and
> > passed all sectors on all four of the disks. it doesn't know they were
> > set up in raid5, it can just see each one individually.
> > 
> > error message i'm getting is something roughly along the lines of
> > "missing required array members", it'll then sit there for a bit, and
> > eventually say "no int13 drives found" and boot continues. can't see any
> > evidence of the array from the os (obviously), nor when poking around
> > from the array management section of the bios. "it ain't in kansas
> > anymore, toto". "
> > 
> > Anybody got any ideas. Might booting up with Linux and software RAID 
> > help to retrieva data?

Assuming that the SATA card's interface works roughly the same as the SCSI
RAID card interface does, do all of the array members show as being
"online" (or do you even get that far)?  Is there an option to check the
health of the raid array?  You should be able to see which of the disks
are not present (or that all of them are not present).  I've used the SCSI
version of Adaptec's cards to rebuild the RAID array based on information
stored on the disks, but that assumes that the disks are fine and the
card's controller is bad--not a cheap option.

John