RAID-5 Failure And Booting

Rishi Chopra rchopra at cal.berkeley.edu
Sat May 29 18:13:03 PDT 2004


My RAID-5 array seems to have died this weekend.  After coming back from
a motorcycle-riding class, I noticed my internet connection was down.  I
hooked up a monitor and a keyboard to my FreeBSD box, and noticed that
the OS was no longer running, that the computer had rebooted, and that
the BIOS message was "Insert Bootable Media In The Appropriate Drive".

I'm unfamiliar with this particular message; can anyone explain what
might have happened?  My understanding is that, since the computer is
running a RAID5 array (Adaptec 2400A card + (4) WD2000JB drives) even if
one drive fails, the computer will continue running.  I checked the 
drives and all 4 are fine; the RAID BIOS also says the array is intact. 
  Unfortunately, Partition Magic and the FreeBSD install program both 
indicate that there is no partition table.

How big is the partition table?  Does it fit on one 8K stripe, or is it 
larger than 8K?  I have a partion table editing program at my disposal; 
can anyone suggest how I might go about editing the partition table to 
reclaim the array?

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