emergency -- Internal RAID disappeared

I've been cutting away on this show for months. Today I worked about 4 hours on it fine, no issues. One of the producers flies in, we're sitting here, I render one nest in a master sequence, everything's fine, I save, I render the nest in the seq and I get a freeze. I wait and wait with no change.

Now I'm compelled to force quit. I do. But it will not let me restart the machine, it kept freezing, so I did the deed, the cold shut down, and now... my internal RAID is missing. I restarted twice. I zapped P-RAM, I've gone into Disc Utilities, and I can see there that it recognizes that the RAID is there (it states that it's online but the two individual drives that compose the RAID state offline).

Any advice? Luckily the producers have an archive nearby to investigate for a couple of hours while I try to get this solved. Any help at all would be incredibly appreciated.

Thanks in advance guys.

John

OS 10.4.9
2x3 Ghz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
3GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM

Shutdown, unplug the box for 30-60 seconds, plug back in, start up, voila.

This has worked to solve the same problem for me several times before.

Adam Duplay

Unfortunately, it's not working. I'm worried.

Does anyone think Disk Warrior might have a utility to take help here? I don't have it but I can buy it online if it's got a potential solution.

Thanks.

Disk Warrior is powerfull, and has saved us more than once. It has been worth the cost for us. DW has a function called "rebuild Directory" that often solves stubborn disk problems - it has also been know to help mount disks that otherwise dont mount.

What you may be experiencing is the begining of the end for one of the drive that make up the RAID. If the hardware is failing, best to identify which disk that is and change out that disk asap.

You also may want to make sure you have no loose connections or dusty wires in the spaghetti tangle that is connecting the RAID inside your box.

Adam Duplay

Okay, I've tried everything I know at this point. I've also powered down and re-seated the drives, all to no avail.

On to Disk Warrior.

Thanks, Adam.

You never said which RAID you installed.

One of the downsides of common RAID configurations is what happens when one or more drives bites dirt.

I agree with the damaged drive idea. Just for giggles how full is your System Drive and all your other drives? Filling up a System Drive can cause System Insanity.

Can Disk Warrior rescue a RAID? I don't remember that being one of its talents in the instructions.

Koz

It's a RAID 0 (Zero), Koz.

<<<It's a RAID 0 (Zero), Koz.>>>

OK, so it's striped. Any damage on either drive will ripple across a lot of files, but it's fast and large.

I'm not sure I understand why the system thinks both drives went off line, tho. That's why I asked you about your System Drive. How is your System Drive?

Koz

The system drive is fine. When I'm in disk utilities, it sees the RAID, which is called "Storage," it sees it fine, it just won't bring it up. It does state something about an "exit" issue, which ostensibly was born from the problematic shut down. I'm down, man... hurting.

Thanks.

Find another Mac and plug the raid in. I'm betting it will mount. If it does find a way to get the files off, erase and re-format the Raid and put the files back. Or...unplug your Raid, shut down your Mac. Pull the power cord from your Mac and wait an hour. Plug it all back in.

Michael Horton
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Thanks, Mike. Will try this last option.

Nothing worked... until Disk Genius. It was able to repair the issue. The RAID's been backed up!

It looks like you got it back up. Consider yourself VERY fortunate on several fronts. Raid 0 has no error correction. It is the most risky form of RAID.

Maybe others can chime in who have done lots of production work with RAID 0. I would be scared silly of a data dropout. I hear horror stories of people rebuilding RAIDs when they have a layer of error checking, like RAID 5 but with RAID 0 when it goes kablooey, it goes kablooey.