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Recently my wifes crafting system, which has a Promise Fasttrak TX4 2x40g RAID0 (Maxtor ATA100's), started giving her problems.
While the cards bootup diagnostic showed it to be an intact array Win2K showed the contents of the array severely truncated with only its Audio folder present, and you couldn't open that folder at all. It basically acted as if one of the drives had an error.
No mix of Win2K, Norton or other tools could fix the problem, which became very frustrating very fast given she had a lot of active projects on the array.
Things were getting ugly and the heat was on you-know-who to fix things fast
Maxtor's Powermax tool to the rescue!!
Powermax can "see" the individual drives in a Promise RAID (haven't tried it on other makes yet) and run diagnostics on each separately. It extracts to a PC-DOS floppy that runs at bootup.
As it turns out the drive on the secondary master had an error which Powermax found and fixed. I booted back into Win2K and as soon as I opened the RAID it was obvious Powermax had done its job. EVERYTHING was there and intact.
The next move was to back-up all the files on her RAID0 over the network to my RAID5, format her RAID0 just for safeties sake and copy them back.
I also copied them to DVD-RAM's just for safe keeping
Maxtor says Powermax will work on any ATA drive of 500 megs or larger even though it's targeted to their Maxtor and Quantum products.
One more permanent addition to the toolkit!!
Dr. Mordrid
While the cards bootup diagnostic showed it to be an intact array Win2K showed the contents of the array severely truncated with only its Audio folder present, and you couldn't open that folder at all. It basically acted as if one of the drives had an error.
No mix of Win2K, Norton or other tools could fix the problem, which became very frustrating very fast given she had a lot of active projects on the array.
Things were getting ugly and the heat was on you-know-who to fix things fast
Maxtor's Powermax tool to the rescue!!
Powermax can "see" the individual drives in a Promise RAID (haven't tried it on other makes yet) and run diagnostics on each separately. It extracts to a PC-DOS floppy that runs at bootup.
As it turns out the drive on the secondary master had an error which Powermax found and fixed. I booted back into Win2K and as soon as I opened the RAID it was obvious Powermax had done its job. EVERYTHING was there and intact.
The next move was to back-up all the files on her RAID0 over the network to my RAID5, format her RAID0 just for safeties sake and copy them back.
I also copied them to DVD-RAM's just for safe keeping
Maxtor says Powermax will work on any ATA drive of 500 megs or larger even though it's targeted to their Maxtor and Quantum products.
One more permanent addition to the toolkit!!
Dr. Mordrid
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