[Kate]

Recently the startup drive of my server (X Server 10.2.6) had issues. There is also a (mirroring)RAID set working in the server, setup from two ATA drives connected to an ACARD and powered by Apples RAID driver.

When I had to reinstall the system on the boot volume I lost access to my RAID. The drives could be seen, they were reported to be a correctly working set of RAID drives, but failed to mount.

When doing a mount operation via terminal it gave me the error message " unknown filesystem or data format".

So I had to wipe the RAID and add the drives to a new RAID set. I had a good backup, but still lost some important data.

I found no documentation, that you have to reformat your RAID in case you need to reinstall the OS.
What type of data security is this, if I loose my RAID data in case the start drive has failures? The whole point of RAID is to be able to recover data by means of a second drive in my case. This is undermined entirely as soon as the startup drive has issues. You not only loose your boot volume, but also your RAID data. This is sort of ridiculous.

Or am I missing here something?
Apple states for their XServes, that you need to reformat your RAID in case you are reinstalling the OS. Is that the common approach??? Is this sane?


Anybody probably knows a workaround?

[twinspop]

Apples KB has this article

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106987

I'm not exactly clean on all that happened, but maybe the above document will help in future disk failure situations.

[Kate]

Thanks. I'm aware of that info.
Sad enough it provides no further detail to solve my issues.

That article clearly states that after rebuilding the mirror, the RAID should simply mount instantly, or after a reboot.

It offers no help if this does not happen.

Thanks anyway.