Someone has asked me to rebuild a faulty raid 5 on a 3ware raid controller. I have 3 drives, all of them is 160 GB. I've gone through the steps, ie selected the degraded array unit, and then gone over to "Rebuild Array", and inplace of "Degraded" it now says "REBUILDING (after F8)".
I hit F8, and it attempts to load the OS, but then it fails a disk check at 57.6%. Any ideas?
OS is debian by the way.
Doesn't sound good...You can try ripping the "rebuilding" drive out, on the chance that you just got a DOA drive, but chances are it was one of the others that failed. Rebuilding a failed drive is a common source of failure with raids...It's an intensive process.
I once had a 20 drive array fail one drive after another as the array was being rebuilt; when the smoke cleared I'd replaced 18 drives because they warned of failure, and 2 others just because I didn't trust 'em (This is why you never buy 20 drives from the same production group).
Did the RAID controller run into any errors on the rebuild or is it now reporting a healthy volume? By disk check do you mean fsck? Is the error on the file system or is the RAID Volume disappearing to the OS and triggering IO errors?
As we all know, or find out the hard way, RAID is not backup and in most cases like this the fastest way to get a working system back up is to restore the data from backups.
do you know which disk failed first? If you do, you can try to recreate the array, and pull the first failing disk offline, so you will get a working, degraded raid array. enough to get the data off of it
Boot from a bootable CD, copy out any critical or recently-modified data, replace all three disks, and recover the rest from a backup. It's not worth trying to solve problems like this, and there's always a risk that some corrupted data will sneak through and be ready to bite you in the future. This is why you make backups.
You can attempt to requalify the three drives once this machine is back up and running if you want to.