On Wed, 05 Jun 2019 12:44:13 +0930 Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 20:40 -0500, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
Yes, it is a hardware RAID. The BIOS is very confusing but it does not say anything in there (anymore).
Hardware RAID *relies* on the hardware. If you lose the hardware, you lose access to your files. So, a motherboard dying can make the files useless on a perfectly good drive.
You'd need to replace the hardware with a suitable equivalent (which may not be possible) to re-access your data. This is why we recommend against using hardware RAID.
If you're using RAID for data backups, you absolutely don't want to be dependent on particular hardware for the drives.
Did you (or someone else) take anti-static precautions when building your PC, or later handling? If not, you set yourself up for this kind of thing. People don't usually instantly kill static-sensitive components, they usually seriously degrade them. They apparently work fine at the time, but later on they fail. And because of the time frame, you don't associate the failure with putting your system together.
Thanks very much! The machine came from Dell. It is possible that this sort of precaution was taken but I do not know. I was unaware that hardware RAID is not recommended.
I am not as bothered about the / drive, because my /home is somewhere else (on a 2TB system with both hardware RAID and another mount where it backs up via an hourly cron job) but it is a nuisance not being able to do anything.
I will look into the software RAID.
Many thanks and best wishes, Ranjan