Raid problem with LSI raid card

[se7enup]

Hi, I'm new to using Raid and even newer here.

I have a small server that is using an LSI MegaRAID SAS 8308ELP raid card.
This was set up to run 2X80gb disks (raid1) for the O/S.
this all works fine with no problems and very good performance.

I recently added 2XSamsung 500Gb disks, also raid1.
These worked for several days without problem.

The server was restarted and the LSI card reported that the disk installation had failed.
I thought "failed disk". However, I can install each disk as a single disk without problem and run them on any channel.
However, as soon as I connect both disks to the card, it reports a badconf error on a disk (this seems to be random and doesn't seem to follow either a disk or a channel).
Plugging both disks directly onto the server motherboard means Windows sees both disks OK

I know the disks are OK and the card is OK - my O/S is running on it with out problems.

Anyone got any ideas on what's going on?
A friend suggested corrupted "metadata" - I don't know what this is

 

[mike99]

Have you RTFM?
Try http://www.lsi.com/support/index.html

Mike.

 

[se7enup]

I spent around an hour looking through the support pages of both LSI and Samsung.
I didn't find anything that relates to my problem.

That's why I posted here.

 

[mike99]

Sorry, my crystal ball was a bit murky, so I didn't know that you had read the manual and looked at the LSI support. Have you tried fitting one drive from each array without going through a RAID setup? If they work you can try putting all the drives back on the LSI and then set each array to rebuild, ensuring you use the known good drives as source for rebuild. Each disk may be ok, but they need re-mirroring. The meta data is the extra info on each drive used by the RAID controllerin its configuration of the arrays.

Mike.

 

[se7enup]

Thanks for the reply Mike,

My problem is that both the 500Gb disks work on their own (and when connected directly to the motherboard) but as soon as I connect them both to the LSI card, it reports a "badconf" on one or the other of the disks.
In this state it won't rebuild and I'm unable to change the state to "goodconf".

I've been told that a low level format of the disks will remove any corrupt metadata and this should hopefully allow my to set up the raid once again.
There is no data on the disks so it won't be the end of the world.

I'm hoping to speak to a tech guy from LSI early next week before doing anything drastic.