Question : Problem: RAID5 drive failure, rebuilt OK, now windows wont even boot recovery console, hangs examining disk

got a video editing system here which suffered a RAID5 drive failure along with a serious software crash (the avid software hung and completely locked out) at the same time
it's an adaptec 2820SA raid card with 6 SATA disks forming a 5-disk array with a hotspare

i came to the machine in a powered-off state, powered it up and loaded the RAID BIOS, at which point it began rebuilding the array onto the hot spare. after several hours it completed and gave the RAID status as "optimal". i've double and triple checked the RAID config and it's correct - it used to consist of drives 0,1,2,3,4 as the array and 5 as the spare. it now consists of 0,1,5,3,4 as the array, with drive 2 failed.

after the rebuild completed, we rebooted, windows begins to load but after the XP logo appears all disk activity stops. the moving bar underneath the logo keeps moving, but nothing happens. it's been left in this state for about 15 minutes with no progress.

the same is true in safe mode, all (i think) the drivers load, it gets to agp440.sys anyway, and that's the end of all disk activity.

so i've tried to boot to recovery console off a windows CD, given it the RAID driver off a floppy (wont even recognize it without that), and it gets as far as "examining 1525579MB disk 0 at id 0 on bus 4 on aac..." and hangs here

where to go from here ? format/reinstall is not simply a last resort, it is absolutely not an option. there must be a way to get windows to recognize this disk, after all RAID 5 is supposed to protect us against drive failure !

Answer : Problem: RAID5 drive failure, rebuilt OK, now windows wont even boot recovery console, hangs examining disk

right, contacted UK support after the site woke up and gave me the number (40 minutes of refreshing)

while the support site has been utterly useless, the telephone support has been exemplary.

by removing the drives, we had no trouble installing the driver and management console for the controller card, so that ruled out any fault there. next step was to assume one of the drives was causing the driver to hang, so we rebooted and tried with each drive in place individually, with no other drives in. unfortunately it booted every time so it didn't appear to be a fault with any of the drives either.

so i removed all the drives from the system and made a nice tower out of them on the bench, with dvd cases inbetween them so the electrics wouldn't short circuit, and re-connected the entire array directly to the controller card, bypassing the backplane.

and the system booted, windows mounted the array, and all the data was as we expected it !

so we have a failed backplane. and again, adaptecs telephone support has been superb throughout this. shame i cannot say the same for the website. specifically any pages at ask.adaptec.com (which is where most of the important info is, such as contact numbers, knowledgebase, etc) just time out continually, which really added to the frustration of this experience.