Mac Pro RAID card disaster

[mcnaugha]

Does anyone have any experience of recovering from the apparently failure of a RAID array on a Mac Pro RAID Card (Original)?

We have a High School server which had been built with the Mac Pro RAID Card (Original) and 4 x 750GB drives into a RAID 5 array. Two volumes were created. One for the OS and the other for Data. I didn’t plan the setup of this and it’s probably not how I would have done it.

On Tuesday the Mac Pro froze. Upon reboot it remained at a grey screen. Managed to get it to boot from FireWire. RAID Utility shows all four drives with Green/Good statuses BUT the RAID status for each drive was ‘roaming’. This indicates that it knows they’re part of an array but somehow it’s lost the RAID set data itself.

We haven’t a clue how to recover from this… and to make matters worse… the guy responsible for Server backups left this machine without a backup. We’ve been quoted nearly US$10,000 by an Apple-approved Data Recovery firm. As you can imagine we would rather not go down that route.

We’ve got an AppleCare Support contract. The Mac Pro itself also has APP. So far AppleCare agents have immediately given up and indicated that all is lost. For my research I am inclined to support that as RAID Utility and raidutil seem to be pretty weak when it comes to repairing/rebuilding arrays. It’s incredibly disappointing and we’ve just bought hundreds of Mac Pro RAID Cards (2009) for new Mac Pros. We’re now considering returning them. Even if we had a backup, it’s still pretty disappointing that this card just flipped out and screwed the RAID set. I’ve seen this too many times with other Apple RAID cards. At least megaraid has been helpful in the past. raidutil just doesn’t look useful. I’m hoping someone’s got some secrets up their sleeves here.

Has anyone been here and recovered? Can anyone who happens to be in Apple System Engineering help us out here? 😉 I can get you the AppleCare case ID. We are a massive Apple customer, probably having spent 9 figure sums with Apple over the years and an annual spend of 7 figures.

[Juergen Rohrbach]

Hello,

we have the same problem. do you have any solutions right now?

Thanks,

Juergen

[mcal27]

I’ve just now gotten the same thing. Did anyone find a solution to this?

Al.

[mcnaugha]

I’m afraid we got nothing from Apple, despite having an AppleCare support contract. It cost us £6,000 to get the data recovered.

We have since transitioned to Mac Pro (Early 2009) with RAID Card (2009). This new revision of the card has been much safer so far. We now have these deployed in many of our large sites. We’ve also opted for RAID 0+1 instead of RAID 5. The performance of RAID 5 with these cards was particularly poor. Performance with RAID 0+1 has been much more impressive. I’m actually hoping this choice proves safer for recovery too.

[Pietro]

Hi everyone, I’m new here and I just read the post about the Mac Pro Raid.
I’m having exactly the same problem and i’m really disappointed about how Apple manage this kind of serious problem generated by their hardwear.
Im a photographer and I purchased the Macpro raid card from Apple just to have my archive safe recovered.
Instead i’m in the situation that I probably lost 12 years of my archive and nobody has an idea about how to get out from this dramatic situation.
I have a partial back up but the main consistence of my work was on the raid set.

Please if anyone has any idea or suggestion about a possible solution i would be very appreciate!
Thanks
Pietro

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