[tlug] How to proceed with RAID drive failure

[Martin G <ebisumartin@example.com>]

TLUG,

One of my computers has a RAID on it, which is simply two 500GB drives. It's running Ubuntu 11.04.

Since last night, the computer won't boot up, saying there is no drive with a boot system on it.

Ordinarily, I would do all sorts of things to experiment and test and most likely make things worse before coming here asking for help, but this time I'm trying to be a little more patient and considered in my approach.

I'm a little confused because I thought if one drive failed, then wouldn't the other drive simply carry on. So if the machine isn't booting at all, does this mean a more global failure of some kind, or that both drives have failed because whatever problem was copied between them?

I can be calm about this because I have all my data backed up to an external USB drive, but, if possible, I'd like to proceed in a way that will recover the data on the drives.

So the situation is this: When I boot up, it goes to a terminal screen that says please insert bootable media. The only way to get past that is to insert a CD ROM and boot up Ubuntu from that.

What should I do to proceed?

-- 

Dave M G