Enormous problem with Intel 4200E

[idata]

Just had a power hit for 2 hours......4200E on UPS did a proper shutdown when signalled that the UPS batt was going down.....(at least it looks like it, I wasn't there)....

Now it reawakes with the following status (4 orange lights on the drives) and status box on the dashboard with:

Status MessagesData on your device is unavailable. 4 disks on the device have existing data that will need to be overwritten to re-enable storage. /stg-diskforeign.html?t=2 Click here to authorize overwriting existing data.

I've got 1.6G of stuff on this thing. How do I get access to my data back?

I am going to shutdown till I hear SOMETHING from you guys......

Personal e-mail is available if needed. I need this thing back.....was going to do a full backup after thanksgiving (buying the disks for another backup unit on Black Friday...) right now I have NO backup, cuz I EXPECT an intel devie with RAID 5 to NOT go belly up like this.....(I have another 4200E with no drives in it as a HW spare....would that help?)

[idata]

Based on another discussion about a similar problem, I tried disconnecting each drive individually, then powering up again to see the result.....

After doing this for drive 1, 2, & 3, it gave the same "array is broke" errors, with 4 orange lights in the front, but after disconnecting drive 4 (again, leaving all other drives connected), it came up and said that the array was degraded, but usable.

After doing a full backup of data (1.6GiB worth....a full day and a half of copying), I did another shutdown, removed the drive and ran Samsung diags against it (including full surface scan). This found NO problems (typical), so after erasing the first 10 sectors and last 10 sectors of the drive (using a dos based disk editor that accesses the drive as a raw LBA device) to remove any left over raid array info, I put the drive back in the 4200E.....

And lo and behold, IT'S ALIVE. It took a good 8-12 hours to rebuild data protection, but it's back running fine...

and I've learned 3 things....

1. Intel/EMC doesn't botther supporting things they don't charge multi-thousands of dollars on

no HW compatibility list updates in 10 months,

no SW updates in 6 months or more,

no support for windows 7 32-bit or 64-bit with even the browser access, let alone the backup application,

buggy event viewer (in all of this, the event viewer has lost it's event list multiple times, and still won't tell me what actually failed,

buggy SW falsely detect an array failure when 1 drive has a soft error.....,

no updates to add useful things like:

multiple directories for the media server

torrent server app

fast file mover app to move files between shares (have to use a client to do that).

2. Don't trust the error messages. They are likely wrong, as is the fairly useless event viewer.

3. If you want decent performance out of it, do a shutdown or restart about every 2-4 weeks. Otherwise, it starts slowing down to d-link/WD network share box levels (below 3MB/sec), even on a full gigabit network.

Overall, if I would have known about the total lack of support post-sale, I would have bought a buffalo, or qnap, or something better supported, with features that WORK.

[idata]

Hi There,

Same thing has happened to me and i had done the same steps as you found. But when the degraded message showed and the drives rebuilt... i now find i cannot access the 'old' folder with data. They are visible in the browser interface, and even as admin i can't seem to change the access of the admin to be able to view the folder. It keeps saying that the folder is 'secured'. Great! I'm almost back to getting my data, and now this happens. Any clue how to get access to these folders? they appear greyed out on the access folder panel with a little lock.

Thanks!

Thierry