Drives turning off, not starting again

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Almea

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Jan 11, 2014
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Hello! I have a computer with two drives. My C Drive is a 120 GB SSD and I have a RAID 5 D drive. When I turn on my computer, it starts up fine but after a few min the D drive turns off and won't turn back on. I can still do anything from my C but it can't find anything on the D drives. The drives are just off, no blinking lights, no spinning drives, nothing. I have checked to make sure that the power settings aren't having it turn off but I am at a loss for what to try next. All the data seems available and hole when I restart the computer, until the drives turn off again.

Any suggestions?
 
Solution
SixCoreFiend
Whoever built your RAID-5 array was a wise (and non-frugal) man. Since its -2 there was a backup drive and its in the process of rebuilding. Rebuilding will take a while (we're talking several hours of uptime). Leave the computer on, and when the array is done being rebuilt the partition will come back online in Windows. Then shut it down, open the RAID array utility, and it will specify which drives comprise the array, and which one is no longer in the array (it may even have an indication that it has failed within the array). In most of my motherboard raids, it specifies drives based on serial number.

Assuming you decide to keep the array, remove this drive, and try to find an equivalent drive (identical model being...
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SixCoreFiend

SixCoreFiend

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How is your RAID 5 array setup, and do you have any monitoring tools for it? Are they connected to ports directly on your motherboard, or through a dedicated RAID card? If it is through a RAID card I would think that this would be the place to start.
 
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Almea

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Jan 11, 2014
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They are connected directly to the motherboard and as far as I know I don't have any monitoring tools for it. I inherited this computer and it is my first time dealing with a raid...
 
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SixCoreFiend

SixCoreFiend

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There should be a splash screen during the POST of the system related to the RAID. It will list a hotkey to start up the RAID utility, (Like, Control-K for example). Enter the utility and see if there are any indications of a disk failure in the array.
 
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Almea

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Jan 11, 2014
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it says it is rebuilding. it doesn't give any indication that any specific drive is struggling...but then when it boots up, after about 2 min the drives just shut down.
 
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SixCoreFiend

SixCoreFiend

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If it says it is rebuilding then you have found your answer; your RAID array has a drive failure. In RAID 5 one disk can fail and all the data still be intact. Rebuilding is the process in which it makes itself useable again. You should replace the disk which has failed. I would go back into the RAID utility and see if you can identify the failed disk in any way.

That said, the fact that it says it is "Rebuilding" suggests that whoever put together the array put in a fall-back drive in the event of failure so that it could immediately start rebuilding. Count the number of drives and their capacities to see if this makes sense. The total array should be roughly the size of the (smallest drive capacity) x (the number of drives - 1) if there is not a fall-back drive, or (smallest drive capacity) x (the number of drives - 2) if there is a fallback drive.
 
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Almea

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Jan 11, 2014
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Although it likely isn't related, I did just get an error saying that the device driver software was not successfully installed...I think it is for the external drive I have attached but just in case it matters...
 
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Almea

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Jan 11, 2014
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ok. One last question...I am not currently convinced I want to keep the raid, would it be possible, at this point, to select the the option to convert it back to a non raid and just not use the drive that has failed?

But thank you SOOO much for your help!!
 
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SixCoreFiend

SixCoreFiend

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That is definitely an option, however breaking the RAID means losing all the data on the drives. If that's acceptable to you then you can do it. However I should point out that your current situation is exactly why RAID exists in the first place. If you had been accessing the drives individually, whatever data you had had on the failing drive would likely be lost.

I know the situation seems inconvenient, but it is generally worth it for the one layer of redundancy that you get. Additionally, Raid 5 has a read-speed advantage that you'd be losing (you would find reading files to be significantly slower, most applicable if you were to copy files off of the Raid 5 array to your SSD or an external drive.

It also occured to me that you may be trying to access the data off of your RAID array in the short windows it is accessible while it is rebuilding. I'd recommend against to doing this. Right now the data is intact with a single drive failure. If an additional drive fails, the data is lost entirely. If the drives were bought at the same time (which most RAID arrays are) then the fact that one drive has failed means it is likely that the others could fail as well. Let the RAID array complete rebuilding before attempting to backup data off of the array.
 
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Almea

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Jan 11, 2014
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Trying to back up my data was my first thought when I noticed it was struggling but was planning on doing that once it was more stable.

So I looked back and all the drives add up and none are indicating that they have failed. They all still show the appropriate amount of space and the total space is still equal to the drive space -2 as you predicted. Is there another way to tell which drive failed?

Even if I turn it on and just let it do it's thing the drives still turn off and it comes back with the same issue. Is it turning off because of the failure or something else?
 
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SixCoreFiend

SixCoreFiend

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Jan 11, 2014
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Whoever built your RAID-5 array was a wise (and non-frugal) man. Since its -2 there was a backup drive and its in the process of rebuilding. Rebuilding will take a while (we're talking several hours of uptime). Leave the computer on, and when the array is done being rebuilt the partition will come back online in Windows. Then shut it down, open the RAID array utility, and it will specify which drives comprise the array, and which one is no longer in the array (it may even have an indication that it has failed within the array). In most of my motherboard raids, it specifies drives based on serial number.

Assuming you decide to keep the array, remove this drive, and try to find an equivalent drive (identical model being preferred, if not do some digging and try to find one with the same specs: Capacity, number of platters, and cache being the most important). Set this as the fall-back drive in the RAID utility in the event of a future failure.

Most importantly, don't be nervous! There is nothing broken which isn't in the process of self-correcting. It just feels counter-intuitive because its rare that computers fix themselves.
 
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Solution
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Almea

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Jan 11, 2014
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10,510
So...Even if I let it run without touching everything, within 15 min the drives turn off. When I reboot the computer it still says that the drive is 'repairing' and all the individual drives seem to be ok. Is it just the controller on my motherboard that is having issues? it is a GA-P35-DS3P by Gigabyte.
 
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SixCoreFiend

SixCoreFiend

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I do not believe that your controller has demonstrated having a problem. The time between your posts suggest you gave the Array 3 hours to rebuild. It may very well take more time than this, and the drives not appearing online within Windows during this time is normal
 
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Almea

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Jan 11, 2014
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I left it alone and after an hour or two the drives just turned off. The drives still showed but no lights, no spinning, nothing. I watched it for an hour with no activity before I restarted it....I could wait longer but it was off as I could see...is there another way to tell?
 
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