Wiebetech Faults, Destroys FCP Project, Need Advice!

Colione

Colione

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I have a Wiebetech Silver SATA-II, which is a 2 bay SATA enclosure that is confined to a RAID-1 (Mirror) or RAID-0 (One volume) configuration. For a while I only had one drive in Primary (top) slot of the enclosure. I recently got another drive. Weibetech touts that you can autobuild a drive by inserting a blank drive at any time, and the enclosure will rebuild your Primary drive. So I shut the machine off, inserted my new drive into the Secondary (Bottom) slot of the drive and turned the machine off.

What did the machine do?

It attempted to rebuild the SECONDARY (Bottom) drive to the PRIMARY (top) drive. I saw this on the LCD Display "REBUILDNG SEC->PRI"

So I freaked out and shut the machine off.
I called wiebetech and they said "well, we really shouldn't have labeled the drives PRIMARY and SECONDARY, they should really be labeled TOP and BOTTOM. If you turn the machine off you really have a 50-50 chance of rebuilding the drive you want, we apologize for that inconvience"

50-50 chance?!? Isn't that a little risky, especially for people trying to set up a RAID-1 to have ZERO chance of losing data?

Well, I lost 3 big FCP projects. I used Data Rescue II (which worked very well), but it brings me to the problem I need help with.
All of the Quicktime files recovered from the drive have now lost their file names. Is there ANY way of reconnecting the media based on length? or based on file size?

Does anyone have any fantastic ideas on how I could go about connecting my 300-400 media files that have no names?

Any thoughts would be great!

Thanks
 
Man, that sucks, seems odd that you have a 50/50 chance of rebuilding the right drive. I'm pretty sure you'll have to reenter the file names on your QT's, since that is how FCP recognizes them, but I've never been in this situation.

Sorry about your luck, I'd be---->:badputer:
 
FCP will be no automated help, it'd be up to you to figure it out based on file size or length, or perhaps timecode tracks or soemthing like that. It would probably be faster to just batch recapture
 
After reading your post, I decided to test my own mirrored RAID.

It's based on a Firmtek external hot-swappable SATA card and external enclosure with removable drives. I've never had to swap out a bad drive and replace it with a good one yet, so this was a good chance to see exactly how it all works.

My REAL source files are on another set of Level-1 RAID drives, so it's not like I was doing a test on critical material.

I have three drives that haven't been assigned to anything specific yet, so I created a mirrored pair and put some data on them.

I then pulled one of the drives -- without dismounting it as is the proper procedure -- to simulate a sudden failure of one of the drives. Having it go suddenly missing, I figured, is about as big a failure as any. Then installed the third drive as the "new" drive.

Using Apple's disk utility, it's not hard to tell the utility to rebuild the mirrored RAID with the new drive. And it will confirm which drive is being added, as well as which drive is the source of the data. That helps to prevent wiping out data on the surviving drive. Fairly goof-resistant.

It took about a hour to completely rebuild the mirrored RAID, which can hold about 238 GB of data.
 
You can, in fact, manually relink media in FCP that has a different file name. Just ignore the warnings.
 
Thanks for all the tips.

What I am doing is taking all my my offline files and putting them into one bin. Then importing my 394 files that were recovered in the loss. Organizing them by length, and matching them up by length. It's a little tedeous ... but with the alternative of recapturing 50 tapes...its the way to go!

DCsensui....
The raid on the wiebetech is not controlled by apple disk utility. Once you put in a new drive, it will just start rewriting on it. No confirmation ... no asking...nothing.
In my opinion, it should AT LEAST ASK using the LCD screen "Confirm Rebuild on HDD 2" .... with the whole point of a RAID 1 being security ... this seems like a good measure to take. And if it takes over an hour to rebuilt...I don't think confirming the rebuilding or deletion of an entire drive really adds much to the rebuilding time....
 
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