RAID 5 on Windows 2000 Server 4

[alex304]

I have a Dell Power Edger 4100 with RAID 5. Drives 1 and 3 are bad. The server will not boot. If I stick an IDE drive in and boot from it, can I recover the data from drive 2? The drives were partitioned C and D. C was for the OS and D for the data.

Thanks,

Alex

 

[alex304]

One more thing...the server only has 3 SCSI drives. Also, I only want to recover data.

 

[pgaliardo]

Unfortunatley, if 2 disks go bad in a RAID 5, the data is lost. I think the only option here is to rebuild the server and restore from backup.

 

[kmcferrin]

Yup, your data is toast.

Depending upon the type of drive failure, you might be able to find a data recovery firm that is capable of rebuilding the lost data, but it definitely won't be cheap. Unless your company is going under because of it, I'd chalk it up to a lesson learned.

 

[alex304]

hmmmmm. That sucks. Don't think we will spend thousands of dollars to recover. Thanks anyway.

 

[LWComputingMVP]

Are you sure the drives are bad? Sometimes RAID drives fall offline. If you force them online in the RAID controller's BIOS, you might gain access to them again.

 

[alex304]

OMG!!! lwcomputing...it freakin worked. The RAID Controller BIOS said the drives failed. I thought they were bad for sure. I forced them online and now the server is back up and running. I am doing a full backup now.

THANKS!!!

 

[LWComputingMVP]

It CAN happen that multiple drives fail at once, but in my experience, it never has. AND, when multiple drives do APPEAR to fail, this has always worked for me. I chalk it up to a blip on the SCSI bus.

 

[kmcferrin]

Awesome! I'll file that tip away for future use.

 

[pgaliardo]

Another star for you lw. Didn't even think of that one. Nice job on saving alex304 a ton of heartaches.

 

[alex304]

YES...I was able to sleep peacefully last night. It was a server for an insurance company with about seven years worth of data on it. And the last backup was about 3 years old. I put it back online today and everyone is happy!!! They are now backing up daily.

 

[Freestone]

Great job lwcomputing! I had forgotten all about my experience with drives placed offline but forcing online brought them back. I must admit I never had 2 go offline at once. Perhaps one was offline and the system was running in degraded mode prior to the second drive going offline? I also chalk these one time failures to a glitch on the bus and the BIOS assigns the blame to whatever drive was currently active at the time.

alex304 - Now that the company is backing up daily, you must convince them to test that their backups are viable by performing a restore. Nothing like a false sense of security that readily crumbles when that much needed untested backup fails miserably at restore time.

 

[kmcferrin]

They weren't do backups for three years? And they were an insurance company? Oh, the sweet irony...

You know, after years and years of working in IT you come to assume certain things as fundamental, almost to the point where you would assume that anyone in their right mind would be doing them. Like backups...you'd think that by now they are as second nature as breathing. And then you run across a company that isn't doing them, and you realize that either a) it's not as fundamental as you thought, or b) no everyone is in their right mind.

I'm only saying this because I recently discovered that a customer (which is a software company that generates several hundred million dollars a year in revenue) hasn't been doing backups for a critical part of their infrastructure. So don't make assumptions.