RAID crash....advice needed

I know this is way of topic, but since there area quite a few tech savy people here, I thought I'd ask.

We've had a Eonstor A16U-G2421 raid crash (slot 3, bad block error). And after restrating it, it just says Initializing...please wait. Which is the first step of the boot sequence. It's been stuck there for over 10 hours.

I know raids can sometimes take ages doing things, but am wondering if this is normal or what I can do. I don't get any contact with the raid through terminal or other interfaces, so all I can do is wait and hope (and wait for support to wake up).

Any suggestions?

You don't say what sort of raid?
Did you mirror for tolerance or just speed?

Do you actually have redundancy (RAID 1 or 5)? If not, tough luck.

Do you know 100% sure that your raid was healthy before the drive crash?

If another drive died quietly before the latest one gave out, you'll have a big problem on your hands...

And like flamduck said: What kind of RAID?

RAID-0 (striping) pretty much means you're screwed if a disk fails.

Managed to fix it somehow, thank god. It was set up as RAID 5, I believe, though I didn't set it up initially.

Disconnecting all the drives and restarting it, got it to boot up (no drives though). Then shutting it down and reconnecting the drives got it back online. This was after getting advice from support. The RAID is currently being backed up.

It's a bit worrying that we haven't found an error on any of the drives in any of the logs or tools used to control the raid. I guess we'll be replacing the drive in slot 3 once the backup is done just in case.

Phew....feeling better now. :)

Lesson #1: RAID is not a backup.

If nothing else: RAID just helps you if a drive conks out, but doesn't prevent someone from actively deleting or messing up files.

I'd be replacing the controller if no problems are showing in the logs.

Be careful with that as well -- many RAID controllers store the RAID config in flash ram on the controller itself, NOT on the drives... Which means that if you hook up the same drives to a new controller, you'll lose all your RAID info in the process and it will consider it a set of brand new blank drives.

Make *absolutely* sure that your RAID solution supports swapping out the controller, and if so -- follow the proper steps. You may need to export your existing RAID config to a floppy on the old controller first, and import it on the new one before hookup up any of the drives. Better safe than sorry.