3Ware boot problem, from bad to worse.

MaxBurn

Storage Is My Life
Joined
Jan 20, 2004
Messages
3,245
Location
SC
First of all I have a server with a 3Ware 7500-8 (PATA) and disk configurations as follows:

Two 60Gig Western Digital (mirror - boot drive)
Four 160Gig Samsung Spinpoints (RAID5 - storage)
One 80Gig Western Digital (on motherboard header - scratch drive)

I have the array do a verify weekly and for the last two weeks the Samsung on port 6 dropped out with errors. Both times it was able to be removed, re added and rebuilt the array fine.

I backed up my data on the RAID5 to a USB drive and then, knowing that the drives contain the array information, I shuffled my IDE cables on the drives (moved them all up by one and moved the last to the bottom). My thoughts were I need to know if the drive is bad or it's the cable or maybe the 3Ware card that's bad.

Now boot the computer, I can see my array's in the 3Ware BIOS utility fine, they say they are ok and not degraded.

PROBLEM*********************
The computer won't BOOT, says no bootable media or whatever the BIOS message is that it can't find a boot drive.

What I think the problem is: The boot array (mirror) is now listed second in the 3Ware BIOS configuration utility, where I am 80% certain it was listed first before I did the cable swap. So I think it's looking at the storage array to try to boot which of course wont work. Motherboard BIOS still lists the 3Ware controller as the boot device.


QUESTION********************

If I delete my storage array in the 3Ware BIOS setup and recreate it so that it's listed as the second array will my data still be there? This is in an attempt to get the mirror listed first again so it will boot.


COMMENT/QUESTION***********

My old Promise Fasttrak 66 had the ability to mark the bootable array if you had more than one, why the heck doesn't 3Ware have that ability or am I totally missing the option to do this?
 

MaxBurn

Storage Is My Life
Joined
Jan 20, 2004
Messages
3,245
Location
SC
I mean wow, I can't believe you can't mark the bootable array on these cards. Can you do that in the newer 9000 series cards? Promise has had this feature on their cards sense the start...


All problems solved though. I put the cables back to where they were and it now boots again. To make the troubleshooting change I mentioned above I had to physically swap hard drives. Rescheduled the verify for tonight, we should know if I have an actual bad Samsung by tomorrow.
 
Top