11 Aug 2009 braden   » (Journeyer)

Failing gracefully

A little over a week ago I rebooted hinge after a round of Fedora updates and the RAID card—a 3ware 9550SX—saw neither of the discs in my RAID1 array and failed to load its BIOS. I promptly powered down the system and proceeded to search eBay for a replacement card. A few days later, I swapped in the not-quite-new card I got from an eBay seller; and the machine recognized the drives and booted into Fedora like nothing had happened.

Well, there was one tell-tale sign: on the initial boot-up, the second drive was marked “Not used” in the BIOS boot screen. A trip into the RAID card’s BIOS configuration showed a note by the entry for the array, “Rebuild on F8”. Well, F8 is how to exit the BIOS setup. So I proceeded to do that; and sure enough, the rebuild apparently happened in the background without me noticing anything—because now the array pops up on boot just like it did before the old card failed.

So, props to 3ware for failing gracefully. I set up this RAID array for my home directories precisely because I accept the inevitability of hardware failures. The irony of having the RAID card itself fail is not lost on me; I’m nonetheless impressed with just how smoothly recovery proceeded.

Syndicated 2009-08-11 02:48:44 (Updated 2009-08-11 02:50:09) from endoframe :: log

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