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Call me dumb, but ...

... isn't a RAID system supposed to protect you against disc failures?

So the story is that I installed my new RAID system - RAID 5 using 3 discs, with a hot spare. Installed Server 2003 and then Exchange (and why does the exchange install require you to put the product key in three times, once for each step?). Configured the users, set up OWA, and was just about to attempt configuration of RPC over HTTP.

Prior to getting everything running, I'd removed the floppy drive due to lack of room. After all, who needs a floppy these days, you can boot from CD/DVD. But, dumber than dumb, the ASR disc has to be a floppy? What? How 1980s is that? Deciding that I really wanted an ASR disc I power down, plug the floppy back in, and boot, whereupon I receive the dreaded "Your disc drive needs to be checked". So off it trundles and proceeds to eat its way through my nice new configuration. Now IIS and Exchanged are hosed and I'll have to try installing Exchange in disaster recovery mode, as I don't want to lost what's there.

So the question is, how can I get disc errors, when the c drive is a raid array? How does that work?

I think a cup of tea and a calm down is required before I take an axe to this heap of expensive hardware I've just bought.

posted on Wednesday, November 02, 2005 5:11 PM Print
Comments
 re: Call me dumb, but ...
David Hearn
11/2/2005 5:43 PM
RAID only protects against disk failure. If the OS decides to write garbage to the disk (which is sounds has happened), then the RAID array will nicely ensure that the garbage is stored in a recoverable way, such that should a single disk fail, you can still get your garbage back. ;)

BTW - enjoyed your talks at DDD II - been reading your blog since.
# Small Business Server backups
Digital Strawberry Girl
11/16/2005 2:44 PM
# Small Business Server backups
Digital Strawberry Girl
11/16/2005 2:49 PM
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