RAID RECOVERY HELP

[Parmb]

Hi All,

need a little help. Anyway i have a old Compaq NT4 Srv box.

Data drives run on RAID 5
OS on RAID 1

A disk failed the other day, during my holiday!!. It was replaced however now i can not see any of the data drives. Disk Administration shows this as unused space. I thought as only one disk was replaced this should have automaticvally built the drives.


Am i missing something or am i FUBAR

Any help apprecited

 

[spi200]

Hi

Does not sound good at all, and you are correct that you can lose one drive without a problem on a Raid 5 array. This assumes that the array was healthy to begin with and that the drive change was done correctly. ie swapping the wrong drive in the cage means two drives are now down - Not good at all. Check your event logs if you feel this might be the case as every time there is a status change of the raid array it will be logged.
Going forward, check you Array Config Utility (ACU) that all your drives are healthy and that there are no failed drives in any of the arrays. Then, in the ACU check if the logical volumes shows the drives with red X's or Red ? marks on the drives - if so you may be in luck as this happen to me when our HP guy turned off an entire shelf of disks in a two shelf setup which spanned both shelves of disks. My drives were all marked the X's and we rebooted a couple of times in different orders to on avail, then we noticed a option in the ACU which said the "rebuild" or "reconnect" array. It sounded risky, but we had other options left - same as you. We did this and the array came back online almost straight away.
Windows Administration was fine as the array was being presented to the OS as before.
If your not confortable with any of the sugestions on the forum get in HP and or a data recover company.

Good luck

Dave

 

[burtsbees]

In the future, it is always wise (if you can) to configure a hot spare in the RAID5 array---that way, you are still good if you lose 2 drives, but you need at least 4 drives for this.

Burt