promise ata controler - raid 1 - sync problems!

[jesse reynolds]

Hi

I have a machine in a very weird state. It contains only two 80Gb ATA 
disks connected to a Promise RAID controller, which has them as two 
submirrors of a RAID 1 volume, upon which the freebsd filesystem and 
swap are located.

It was operating on only one drive for a while, and then the machine 
suffered a power outage. After we got it up again the promise 
controller decided both drives were dodgy and the machine stopped 
functioning.

The guy who built the PC went to have a look at it and deleted the 
mirror in the bios and re-created it again, and called me to say 
everything is fine.

Only problem now is that most of the data is way out of date, 
presumably was on the first disk to be failed by the promise 
controller. But weirdly, /etc and /var seem to be recent, but /usr is 
very old.

And whenever I try and write anything to /usr, after a while the 
machine panics and reboots itself. It took about 45 minutes to do an 
automatic fsck just now after one such reboot.

Basically I want to know how I can re-sync the mirror properly so 
that things are in order again.

I would also like some idea as to how the chip decides which disk to 
read it's data from (is it random?)

Can this be fixed remotely? Or does it require going back to Bios to 
remove and delete a disk and add it again or something?

FreeBSD 4.6.2-RELEASE
Dual Pentium III
2Gb Ram

Thanks very much

Jesse


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