[NTLUG:Discuss] RAID-1 server goes down after disk failure/SWAP -- musings..

[Richard Geoffrion]

Michael Barnes wrote:
> Regarding RAID1.
> In my experience, in a RAID1 system, when one drive fails, the entire 
> machine becomes unstable and should be shutdown and repaired ASAP. 
Well, that SHOULDN'T be the case...AND...isn't necessarily the case.  I 
HAVE had RAID-1 systems not go down just because a partition went out of 
sync.  Now..when the whole drive goes...THAT's an issue.   On the 
occasions when I have had a bad drive, I just remove the failed drive 
and reboot the system with only one drive.  The system boots up fine and 
goes about its business (the LILO option "raid-extra-boot" comes in 
handy for making both drives bootable)
> In fact just this last Sunday we had a client machine lose a hard drive. 
> It is a Dell dual processor server with a hardware RAID running Windows 
> XP.  One drive croaked. The POST data said the RAID was 'degraded' and 
> reported one drive as 'error occured'. The machine would not boot.  
Well, that sounds like a Microsoft OS or hardware raid controller issue, 
I'm sure.  I wonder if the secondary hard drive had a partition that was 
made ACTIVE and bootable.
> A few boot attempts and it started reporting corrupted/missing files and 
> XP could not start.  
weird... again..sounds OS/controller related.
> Since it was under a maintenance contract, I just 
> left it until the Dell guy showed up today with a new hard drive. 
> Replaced the drive, fired it up, and all was well again.
>   
CONGRATS!  PHEW

> So, the RAID1 crumping had nothing to do with swap space.
>
>   
...at least in a Microsoft environment.