status: inactive - array degraded - disk sync failure

StephenB wrote:

Do you recall the SMART stats for drive 2? I am wondering if you still have only one uncorrectable error. While you are waiting for support I would try running the seatools diag on disk 2, and perhaps check the SMART stats on the windows PC when it finished. (Acronis disk monitor is one of several free tools that will show them to you). Perhaps also get a USB enclosure or adapter kit, to make it easier to test the disks. that would also let you make a backup. Something like this perhaps: http://www.amazon.com/SABRENT-5-25-INCH-Converter-Activity-USB-DSC8/dp/B008S08D9E/ref=sr_1_5?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1403434282&sr=1-5&keywords=sabrent+usb+3+to+sata+adapter

Thanks for the response.

I have not yet seen SMART stats for the drive. However the log implies 24 uncorrectable errors I believe.

My biggest challenge is that these drives are 3TB and have read a bit about needing a certain kind of support in the BIOS (EFI/UEFI?) to be seen fully correctly. Apart from my NAS devices I have only 1 PC whose BIOS might have the EFI/UEFI and that is my main machine with 6 sata channel fully used. Had I had a spare SATA channel on this machine and IF the BIOS already had EFI/UEFI enabled then I would already have tested the drives on this box. However I would have to be desperate before I would risk changing anything in the configuration of this my main machine.

It is possible that the 3TB drives could be connected in one of my older machines and only 2TB recognized. If this will allow me to see SMART stats I may test it. However my main goal would be to check the integrity of data or use the drive as a target for backup so just getting the SMART data doesn't really help. I have no doubt the drive reporting failures is really dying. I already had one report these errors and then die in the NAS device and then be accepted by Seagate for warranty replacement.

Thanks for the suggestion of the SATA-USB adaptor kit or enclosure. I could not see from its specs whether it supports >2TB disks or not. The last enclosure I bought has a max of 2TB as I am sure do my existing adaptors. My 'budget controller' will not be allowing me to buy any gadgets to help fix this though :wink:

I am aware of Acronis and Seatools and often use rescue CDs like Ultimate Boot or Hiren. Problem is a safe test bed.

I do have an external 1TB drive spare and another 1TB I can free up and a couple of other drives with 500GB or so spare. So in the worst case I can boot the READYNASsystem as is and try and copy off all the data onto the distributed spare space I have. Hope it stays up long enough for me to do that. Then once I have backed everything up either wait until the drive fails or put some process in place to exercise it and drive it faster to failure (if that would work) Then see what the NAS does with the inactive: spare. Whether or not it has my data on once it becomes a primary active drive in the RAID I can reload backups to it. This will be time-consuming and a royal pain but is my fall back low tech solution.

What would be better and what I wonder if any one here knows is
assume I ssh into the NAS device
and my target is to use linux commands on the RAID members to force a full sync
a) can the NAS support this
b) what commands do I need to use

The NAS itself has allowed me to schedule a volume check on next reboot.

But I saw somewhere in these forums about using I guess linux commands (? dd ?) to
c)) identify the unreadable sectors on raid member disk 2 and
d) write zeros into these sectors forcing the drive to remap the bad sectors to good sectors
c) force the re-sync which succeeds because the problem sectors have been zero-filled??

Any files that contain the zero--filled unreadable sectors will be damaged
I may not have understood this recovery process completely correctly

But unless the ReadyNAS software itself has tools to help with something like this I am pretty much on my own.

Saw this link elsewhere in this forum probably
http://linoxide.com/linux-how-to/how-to-fix-repair-bad-blocks-in-linux/
which explains how to use linux command line to deal with hard drive recovery.

doesn't give info on whether
smartmontools
is built into the ReadyNAS linux distribution
or what equivalent might be available

nor does it give info on what command(s) needed to shut down or pause NAS services while the disks are being worked on.

finally what ?NETGEAR package ? handles X-RAID and is there a command to force/trigger re-sync after trying above sector rescue
Or can the ReadyNAS admin interface be used to trigger the re-sync

Thanks again for the suggestions so far.
Ivor