FW: escalation stage 2 [was:RE: Big and ugly bug in 5.1-release]

*snip*

> > Now the controller warns me that one drive is bad (which in fact is
> > definatley not) and allows me to select "continue boot"
> 
> If the controler says it's bad, it may well be.
> 
> > Now please give me a hint what to do. This is my brand new 
> fileserver which
> > collected all improtant data from the last decade and since 
> it's brand new I
> > didn't manage any backup.
> > When testing the hardware (unplugging one drive while the machine was
> > running) I had the same error but I thought that would never 
> happen under
> > normal circumstances.
> 
> Are those disks installed in hotswap enclosures (they usually have
> a keyswitch)?  If not you probably hosed your disk.  ATA is not
> hotswapable!

You are right that unplugging a _non-hotswappable_ ATA-disk isn't 
the best way to try out things but that was my only chance to 
test (BTW: with the Dawicontrol DC-133 (SIL0680) I had no 
problem, although FreeBSD completely ignored the BIOS-RAID settings)

But now my current problem is that it's no longer any test 
environment, like mentioned it's my fileserver which crashed 
because I issued "/stand/sysinstall". Nad not only that it 
crashed the running environment it lso crashed the HPT372 RAID1.
I think I can remember somone reporting a similar problem (with 
RAID-crash after a machine-crash) some time ago but I can't 
remember any answer/statement.

For clarification: I did lots of tests with this controller and 
drives _before_ trusting my fileserver. But now I have a crash 
produced by software (the os, FreeBSD) which formerly I clould 
only produce by hardware misstreatment. One sulution would be to 
delete the RAID configuration in the controler's BIOS and set up 
another system on the (after that again available ad4) to backup 
data from ad6 but that's not really the intention af a RAID1 setup.
Especially not on a server OS like FreeBSD

Thanks,

-Harry

> 
> -- Brooks