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User profile for user: Lane at work
Lane at work Author
User level: Level 1
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MacPro RAID card not initiating recovery after defective drive replaced

One of my artists is using an Early 2009 Mac Pro on 10.9.5 (13F1077). On Saturday morning, while he was not in the office, Drive 1 warned that SMART was reporting early signs of failure. The RAID card degraded the RAID set. I replaced Drive 1 and marked it as a global spare; but recovery is not initiating. I have, subsequent to installing the drive and marking it as a global spare, rebooted the Mac Pro; but the RAID Utility is not showing any Tasks running, and especially nothing about rebuilding the RAID set. As of now, the RAID set and RAID volume are not available. It appears that I can either try to preserve the data on the drives, or I can attempt to manually rebuild the RAID set; but not both. Unfortunately, the artist had all of his projects on the RAID and had not backed them up to servers at the time of the failure.

Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), Apple RAID card

Posted on Apr 27, 2015 8:25 AM

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User profile for user: Grant Bennet-Alder
Grant Bennet-Alder
User level: Level 10
127,195 points

Apr 27, 2015 9:05 AM in response to Lane at work

If a Disk Fails

If a RAID set or volume becomes degraded because a disk has failed, you can use RAID Utility to identify the disk that needs to be replaced.

Note: If your RAID setup includes a spare drive, it is automatically incorporated into the RAID set, and the set switches from degraded to good as soon as the recovery process finishes. If there is no spare, the set will remain degraded until you replace the failed drive, and if a second drive fails before you replace the first, you could lose data.

To replace a failed disk:

  1. 1 Open RAID Utility, select the RAID set or volume that is displaying a problem status indicator, and look for a drive bay with a red status indicator.

    The bay numbers in RAID Utility correspond to the numbered drive bays in your Mac Pro or Xserve.

  2. 2 Replace the bad drive module.
  3. 3 Use the Make Spare command to set up the new drive as a global spare.

    If no spare was available when the original drive failed, the RAID card uses the new spare immediately to rebuild the affected RAID set and volumes. If a spare was available at the time of the failure, it is already incorporated into the affected RAID set, and the new spare remains available until it is needed.


https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA318/en_US/RAID_Utility_User_Guide.pdf


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User profile for user: Lane at work
Lane at work Author
User level: Level 1
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Apr 27, 2015 9:18 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Drive 1 was the one that failed. I replaced the defective Drive 1 with a known good drive of the same 1TB capacity and marked the replacement as a global spare, just as you described. The problem is that the recovery that should have started the moment that the new Drive 1 was marked as a global spare has not started. Is there a way to force that recovery to start, since it did not begin automatically, the way it should have when the new Drive 1 was marked as spare?

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User profile for user: Lane at work
Lane at work Author
User level: Level 1
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Apr 27, 2015 12:18 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Unfortunately, when the drive failed and the artist rebooted before coming to get me, the Apple RAID card forgot about the RAID set. The log showed the RAID set degraded on Saturday; but it was still running, albeit with reduced performance. The RAID volume was still mounted. When the artist rebooted this morning, the RAID volume was no longer mounted and in RAID Utility, both the RAID volume and the RAID set were no longer showing.

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User profile for user: Lane at work
Lane at work Author
User level: Level 1
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Apr 28, 2015 5:48 AM in response to Lane at work

Just to clarify, there is data on the remaining 3 drives. When I attempted to recreate the RAID set, I was warned that there was data on the drives and it would be lost, so I aborted. I have not been able to find any way to get the RAID card to recognize the existing RAID set and RAID volume. Having the new drive (Drive 1) marked as a global spare has had no effect at all. At this point, we are looking into sending Drives 2-4 to a data recovery service. I have subsequently removed and replaced the drives housing the inaccessible data with three blank drives and have built a new RAID set and RAID volume with the exact same names as I used previously. I even tried swapping the data carrying drives back in, in the hope that they would be visible; but no luck there, so I put the new drives back. It appears that there is no solution to this problem because the RAID card is not supposed to ever forget the RAID set. Unfortunately, since it did that, it seems that an option to recover it was never created, since it wasn't supposed to ever happen.

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User profile for user: Grant Bennet-Alder
Grant Bennet-Alder
User level: Level 10
127,195 points

Apr 28, 2015 8:05 AM in response to Lane at work

You may find there are additional "very sharp tools" in the command-line raidutil, available in Terminal. Often the safeguards of the GUI version are not the defaults, so you can do more (more good or more damage) with the command-line version.


Using the Command Line

You can also set up and manage your RAID card from the command line using the raidutil command. For information, see the raidutil man page or type raidutil at the command-line prompt.


https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/ man8/raidutil.8.html


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MacPro RAID card not initiating recovery after defective drive replaced

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