Re: URGENT: Need help rebuilding iir RAID5 array with failed drive

On 28Jun, 2008, at 23:10 , Garrett Cooper wrote:

>
> FWIW (I've discovered this through personal experience and reading a
> lot of docs), the only way to get "hardware RAID" with iir and the
> ICH9R chipset is through the Matrix Manager (either by creating one at
> the BIOS level console or Windows -- bleh). FreeBSD spotted it as a
> single drive (/dev/ar0), so at that point it was being managed by the
> southbridge.

OK, if you have and ICH9 you *do not and can not* use the IIR driver,  
the IIR driver is for HW based RAID cards from Intel (the devices show  
up as CAM disks). I wonder where you got the impression that the IIR  
driver was in use ? The ICHXX are all just plain (S)ATA devices, with  
the versions ending in 'R' having a different PCI ID so the BIOS can  
tell if you paid extra to get the software RAID "option" . Its all  
just marketing rubbish...

This is the essential piece of info here.

> Performance sucks, the array rebuild takes eons (16 hours for adding a
> 1TB drive to an existing 4 x 750GB drive array with an Core 2 E6700
> with 2GB RAM under Vista x64) and the rebuild console is _only_
> available under Windows =(.
>
> At least it's keeping the filesystem intact though, long enough for me
> to make a redundant copy of the data then move all this junk over to
> another safe place while I grab DVD+R/W's and wait for my 3ware card
> to come in the mail..

I hate to bring this to you, but you will not have an intact  
filesystem when the rebuild is done, you have no parity data to  
rebuild from, just as the docs states.

-Søren