recover a raid array

[jamesbird]

Help please - I've just suffered a catastophic failure of a 5500 - the front drive bay seems to have failed to an extent where none of the drives are recognised (they dont even flash their lights at power up).
If I load the drives one by one onto a scsi card they can be seen as physical drives, so I know they are OK BUT how can I best get the raid 5 array I had configured on a seperate machine to recover the data?
Any (simple to follow) ideas please.
Thanks and all the best
James

 

[spi200]

Hi

You might be lucky with the RAID set still being in tact, as it sounds like there is a failure of the controller or disk chassis which is stopping the drives from being spun up.
Essentially all you have to do is put that RAID set in another 5500 ( or similar Server) with the same type of controller. The RAID set holds its identity, so when it is powered up it will warn you that the dirve config has changed (from what ever was removed) to your RAID set which you have just inserted. Accept the warnings and proceed with caution - the drives should spin up and unless you have mixed up your drives or the drives have failed then you will be back in business.
Just another thought after I started typing, you may have one bad drive which is upseting the SCSI bus. As RAID 5 allows 1 drive to be missing then you could try to boot your machine short one drive, but do NOT take more than 1 drive out or the RAID set at one time and power-off between attempts otherwise you will have a failed raid set on your hands.
Failing all of the above, there are data recovery companies that for a price will check your raid set for you have even quote on the recovery. They can often tell you how successfull they will be before hand. One company I have delt with is Ontrack data recover specialists, but they are not cheap.


Good luck

David

 

[jamesbird]

Horary - It lives! Problem in the end was a faulty '6 way' drive cage. Took me a long time to diagnose it - swapped the scsi controller, scsi ribbon cable, as the power is daisy chained through the cage and the CD drive was OK, I thought that the cage must be OK (after all there's not much to the cage).
Picked up on ebay an unused 5500 (mint in the box) for £1 - admittedly it had no processors, but everything else including RAM for £1. BUT it had the newer high density '11 way' cage! So spent £25 on a working Proliant 3000 just to steal the cage. Had a bit of trouble booting from the smart start CD, when eventually I did it let the RAID repair 1 of the disks, and Bob's your auntie - there it is data and all.
So I think I've found the single point of failure in a 5500 - the scsi cage electronics, my guess is that as it went down it let/made one of the RAID5 disks corrupt.
A brand new 5500 for £1 - what's the depreciation on that been?
Signing off Happy

 

[spi200]

Hi Jamesbird

Good to hear you had a win.


Regards


David