Degraded Raid Set, Can I fix it? Options

[jfitz]

Uh oh...
Firstly, I am a novice and have inherited this Mac which is great and all but....
I have a G4 dual processor with a mirrored RAID drive. Disc Utility says that it's status is "Degraded". Both drives that make up the RAID set also show their status as "Degraded". Am I screwed? Can I fix this and how?

Thanks
jfitz

[dixiechicken]

It is usually possible to rebuild the array.
That is - copy the raid-info - from the fresh drive to damaged drive.
I havent tried this on a Mac though.

The raidtools usually allow you to - remove one or the other drive -
from your mirrored raid-setup. (at least on a PC with a proper raid-card).

When you remove the faulty drive from the raid-setup you'll get a warning that the setup is NO LONGER FAULT tolerant - but your computer will still
be able boot on the functioning drive.

Removing the the fresh drive from the raid-setup will stop your computer from finding the boot-drive and a functioning system.

In the raid tools you MUST choose to rebuild your mirrored configuration
from the fresh drive to the faulty drive.

All the above is done the bios/firmware of the raid-card controller on a PC.

However on a Mac OS-X machine I would try to boot the computer from the Panther/Jaguar boot CD start installation -
BUT go to the Apple menu and choose the Disktool and try to repair the mirrorored raid setup.

I havent tried this on a Mac though so I dont know if it will actually work.
Try to backup/copy your important docs FIRST - before you try this.

Cheers: Dixiechicken

[dmrkh]

Hey jfitz, any luck?