Hi,
My apologies for the OT nature of this post.
I have a Dell T5810 which has a SSD drive that is 2 x 60gb stripped to 120Gb. (ONe was a raid version of the other.) This has /, /boot, /usr/local and swap as partitions.
I also have three 2TB (SATA, non-SSD) hard drives (one that is raid of the other and the third simply backing up usign rsync every hour, since I am old-fashioned and like seeing what is happening). This has my /home and is not in issue.
Last week, I switched the configuration to UEFI boot from Legacy, reinstalled Fedora 30, and updated to the latest stable 5.1.5. Everything was going fine until last night when there was an exorbitant demand on memory (because of a program which progressively asked for more memory) and everything froze. So I had to do a hard reboot.
However, the machine now does not come up. All I get is the splash screen 120GB drive "Offline"
Does anyone have suggestions as to what to do to get this drive back online?
Apologies again.
Many thanks, Ranjan
-- Ranjan Maitra maitra@gmx.com
On 6/4/19 8:20 AM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
However, the machine now does not come up. All I get is the splash screen 120GB drive "Offline"
I assume this is from the firmware? I don't understand why it would be telling you it's offline though. "Splash screen"? What does it mean by "offline"? I've never seen something like that.
Does anyone have suggestions as to what to do to get this drive back online?
Try booting a live image and see what you can find.
Hi,
Thanks!
On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 10:27:24 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 6/4/19 8:20 AM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
However, the machine now does not come up. All I get is the splash screen 120GB drive "Offline"
I assume this is from the firmware? I don't understand why it would be telling you it's offline though. "Splash screen"? What does it mean by "offline"? I've never seen something like that.
Sorry, this was not clear.
On the screen after the "Dell", the T5810 lists the available hardware. The first entry is of the SSD which is RAID0 and "Offline" (the latter in red).
Does anyone have suggestions as to what to do to get this drive back online?
Try booting a live image and see what you can find.
The SSD does not show up at all when I run the live installer.
Either the SSD has gone kaput or there is a problem with the cables, I guess.
Many thanks, Ranjan
On 6/4/19 5:45 PM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 10:27:24 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 6/4/19 8:20 AM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
However, the machine now does not come up. All I get is the splash screen 120GB drive "Offline"
I assume this is from the firmware? I don't understand why it would be telling you it's offline though. "Splash screen"? What does it mean by "offline"? I've never seen something like that.
Sorry, this was not clear.
On the screen after the "Dell", the T5810 lists the available hardware. The first entry is of the SSD which is RAID0 and "Offline" (the latter in red).
It's a hardware RAID? You have two SSDs in the computer? Have you gone into setup to see what the RAID configuration says?
On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 18:24:42 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 6/4/19 5:45 PM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 10:27:24 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 6/4/19 8:20 AM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
However, the machine now does not come up. All I get is the splash screen 120GB drive "Offline"
I assume this is from the firmware? I don't understand why it would be telling you it's offline though. "Splash screen"? What does it mean by "offline"? I've never seen something like that.
Sorry, this was not clear.
On the screen after the "Dell", the T5810 lists the available hardware. The first entry is of the SSD which is RAID0 and "Offline" (the latter in red).
It's a hardware RAID? You have two SSDs in the computer? Have you gone into setup to see what the RAID configuration says?
Yes, it is a hardware RAID. The BIOS is very confusing but it does not say anything in there (anymore). My understanding is (and I am green here) is that the SSD drive is 2 x 60GB and stripped to 120GB. I don't know what this means (but yes, one drive is a mirror of the other, and I only had access to 60GB when I installed last week).
Thanks again! Ranjan
On 6/4/19 6:40 PM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 18:24:42 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 6/4/19 5:45 PM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 10:27:24 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 6/4/19 8:20 AM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
However, the machine now does not come up. All I get is the splash screen 120GB drive "Offline"
I assume this is from the firmware? I don't understand why it would be telling you it's offline though. "Splash screen"? What does it mean by "offline"? I've never seen something like that.
Sorry, this was not clear.
On the screen after the "Dell", the T5810 lists the available hardware. The first entry is of the SSD which is RAID0 and "Offline" (the latter in red).
It's a hardware RAID? You have two SSDs in the computer? Have you gone into setup to see what the RAID configuration says?
Yes, it is a hardware RAID. The BIOS is very confusing but it does not say anything in there (anymore). My understanding is (and I am green here) is that the SSD drive is 2 x 60GB and stripped to 120GB. I don't know what this means (but yes, one drive is a mirror of the other, and I only had access to 60GB when I installed last week).
I would recommend disabling the hardware RAID if possible and use the Linux software RAID instead. RAID0 is combining the two drives for more space (and speed) not redundancy and you should have 120GB. RAID1 is mirroring which would mean 60GB.
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.
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
On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 18:57:14 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 6/4/19 6:40 PM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 18:24:42 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 6/4/19 5:45 PM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 10:27:24 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
On 6/4/19 8:20 AM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
However, the machine now does not come up. All I get is the splash screen 120GB drive "Offline"
I assume this is from the firmware? I don't understand why it would be telling you it's offline though. "Splash screen"? What does it mean by "offline"? I've never seen something like that.
Sorry, this was not clear.
On the screen after the "Dell", the T5810 lists the available hardware. The first entry is of the SSD which is RAID0 and "Offline" (the latter in red).
It's a hardware RAID? You have two SSDs in the computer? Have you gone into setup to see what the RAID configuration says?
Yes, it is a hardware RAID. The BIOS is very confusing but it does not say anything in there (anymore). My understanding is (and I am green here) is that the SSD drive is 2 x 60GB and stripped to 120GB. I don't know what this means (but yes, one drive is a mirror of the other, and I only had access to 60GB when I installed last week).
I would recommend disabling the hardware RAID if possible and use the Linux software RAID instead. RAID0 is combining the two drives for more space (and speed) not redundancy and you should have 120GB. RAID1 is mirroring which would mean 60GB.
Thank you very much again! I was not aware of this. I will do so. Btw, when I disable hardware RAID, does that mean that I need to reinstall the OS?
Many thanks and best wishes, Ranjan
On 6/4/19 8:50 PM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 18:57:14 -0700 Samuel Sieb samuel@sieb.net wrote:
I would recommend disabling the hardware RAID if possible and use the Linux software RAID instead. RAID0 is combining the two drives for more space (and speed) not redundancy and you should have 120GB. RAID1 is mirroring which would mean 60GB.
Thank you very much again! I was not aware of this. I will do so. Btw, when I disable hardware RAID, does that mean that I need to reinstall the OS?
Yes, you will. But it sounds like it might be gone anyway.
Did you check what the BIOS has to say about the RAID?