On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 09:58:24PM -0700, Sean Bruno wrote: > Hmmm...The controller itself failed when copying from the small disk to > the large disk? No, it was probably the original last "good" disk failing while writing and delivering corrupt data to the hardware duplicator. The DiskJockey doesn't do a drive comparision automatically--it assumes that the source and destination are good, and only fails the copy if it gets a bad read indication from the source, or a bad write from the destination. If the source gives bad data, but doesn't indicate a read error, you get GIGO. There is a hardware comparison function, but you'd have to run that as a subsequent pass on the source/data drives. Why do I suspect the above? Because I tried to run the comparision after that post, and it failed. Then a recopy failed after reading only about 200Mb from the source--it had finally failed all the way. My postmortem on this whole thing was that Linux, at that time, knew nothing about the Adaptec 1200, so it just saw it as a single hard drive, 'hda', when the RAID function was enabled in the controller. This was good, in that it just ran, while the controller mirrored the data; it was bad, in the end, because it could never know when one of the drives in the array had a problem. (since there's no driver in the OS to read extended functions, such as RAID status, and thus no feedback from the controller.) The only way to detect a drive failure would be to periodically reboot the server and watch the Adaptec BIOS messages. THE END RESULT: I upgraded to the latest version, reinstalled, and recovered the user/config data from my unpatented-and-free-for-use removable IDE Hard Drive Backup Unit. (Basically, the only trick is to use 'hdparm' to allow you to swap the IDE drive, which is in a caddy in a removable drive bay. The bay/caddy have to be hot-swappable.) Linux now says it now knows about this controller and offers to build a RAID array. Don't trust it. It _did_ seem to build an array on the two new drives, but Grub can't boot from it. I ended up just making a software RAID in Linux for all data except swap and the boot partition, turning off the RAID function in the Adaptec and using it just as a reasonably high-performance ATA100/EIDE controller. I lose a small bit of the partition on the second disk for the equivalent of the boot partition, but that's worth it to have congruent configurations (makes it easier to rebuild a failed drive), and does provide a place to archive the boot partition. I'll have a cron job periodically copy the real /boot to the new /bootsave. It's all good now, except I'm tracking down all the accumulated magic bits I've developed over the past four years and making sure they work in the new system. Having a full recovery of the original system makes this tedious but easy. All things considered, the Adaptec 1200 is an obsolete controller, and if I didn't already have it in a system, I'd never use one today. Cheers, -- Dave Ihnat President, DMINET Consulting, Inc. dihnat@xxxxxxxxxx
