I am running suse 9.3 one a server with SCSI RAID installed. Several days ago, when I turn on the server, it kept beeping while booting the system and halt. I boot with rescue disk and repair it by (re)installation mode (just check and fix, not really reinstall). And after that during bootup, it ends up with

Waiting for device /dev/sda3 to appear .... not found -- exiting to /bin/sh
$ _

I google the solution for two days and find some suggestions. Someone suggest me to mkinitrd and reiserfsck, I did both, but still no good.

I am able to boot up the system with the rescue disk, so I try to backup the important data asap. However, /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda4 are too big (one is 15GB and the other is 80GB) to fit a DVD, so I tried to backup it up to a tape by running (I start to backup xxx in home directory at /dev/sda4 first)

tar -cvf /dev/st0 /home/xxx

After long running (before done), it start to beep discontinuously.

I reboot the system with the rescue disk, and try to compress some important data (not all) with tar, still, after a long run, beeping again.

It is really annoying. How can one tell if this is a problem of software or hardware?

By the way, I am using raid array (raid 5). In the RocketRaid bios setting utility, it reads

--------------------------------------------------------------------
No Array_name RAID_LEVEL CAPACITY (GB) STATUS OCE/ORLM
1 RAID_S_0 RAID_5 1756.44 CRITICAL
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Does anyone know why the status is CRITICAL? What does it mean? How to fix it?

Within the same bios utility, there are some tools to delete/create raid arry, I try to delete it but it prompt: "If you press 'Yes', all data will be removed ..." Does it mean all data in the harddrive will be gone if I delete the raid array?

Beeping when you turn the system on usually sounds like a memory issue, but also not finding the hard drive, sounds like it might be a motherboard failure.

If the drives are too big, and you have another computer, you can backup to it using ssh somthing like this should do the trick:

tar zcvf - /home/xxx | ssh username@example.com "cat > /backup/mydata.tar.gz"


It does sound like it may be a hardware issue too me, but I'm not sitting at the computer so It's hard to say for sure.

Yes deleting it will destroy all your data, so it would not be a good thing to do. The partitions and the mbr will be wiped, so then the only way to retrieve the data would be to send it to people who specialise in data retrieval, and this can be quite costly, depending on how valuable the data is.

I haven't really worked with raid setups before, so I don't know if you can put the drives in another computer and read the data of the drives.


That would mean there is serious problem with the raid device, so whether this is a problem related to the drives themselves, or whether it's a problem with the motherboard.

Thanks for your reply.

I got another question. I have some softwares installed in the system. If I backup all files in / (root), /boot and /home, aftet that, I format all paritions and reinstall the system. Then I restore all files to the new installed system, will the old softwares work in the new system?

They wont unless you include the /etc directory, If you want the old software to work you really need to back up the configuration files for your applications. These will usually be in the /etc directory, or a directory under /etc, though this isn't always the case with all applications, so you would need to find out for each of them keep their configuration files and make sure that is backed up as well.