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| PowerEdge 1650 Perc 3/Di RAID 5 container dead - both members missing |
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| Name : scott
Date : 10-11-10 20:56
Hit : 3556
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We have a very old Dell PowerEdge 1650 with Perc 3/Di RAID 5 server, which worked great for at least 5 years died yesterday. A month ago, the RAID 5 server with 3 SCSI U320 drives stopped working - CRITICAL condition with 1 missing member. We were able to rebuild the missing member, and the server worked fine for a month.
Yesterday, the server died again but with 2 missing members and the RAID 5 condition is DEAD. We are unable to boot the drive, as there are two out of 3 members missing. I hardly doubt that both hard drives die at the same time. This must be controller related problem, which I have no way to repair without having to use 3rd party utility. The Perc configuration has been self adjusted to a 1 member container, which I have no way to reconfigure it to 3 member RAID 5.
Our latest full backup was done a month ago, so unless we recover the RAID drives we'll losing a month worth of data which is very critical. I'm assuming that the drives themselves are fine. Is there a easy fix for this type of problem? Any insight will be very grateful.
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| Aladar |
10-11-12 00:26 |
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Do you have the option of calling Dell? While I have never had to do it, there is a way to get the controller to use the volume information off the the drive instead of the controller. I have moved the RAID drive to another server and let it boot dispite the errors and copy the files off that way, but by making the selection you did, that may not be possible any longer. I have used a program called File Scavenger to get data off of defunct disk, but I have never tried it from a failed RAID. I have used an adapter that converts the RAID type drived into one that will work on a SCSI cable. If you have this option, you may be able to plug it into a regular SCSI controller and copy the data off of it.
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| Aladar |
10-11-12 00:31 |
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Found RecoverSoft® Data Rescue PC, downloaded, created a boot CD and booted PC with SCSI mounted. This tool found all the directories and files on one of the RAID SCSI drives. Paid my US$99 and now stripping data off to a USB drive.
RecoverSoft® Data Rescue PC appears to be a great tool if someone else has this type of problem. Cheaper then a disk recovery service!
www.atl-datarecovery.com/data-recovery-software/data-recovery-products/data-rescue-pc/index.htm
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| scott |
10-11-13 12:40 |
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Ok, we were able to recover the system by doing the following:
1. At the BIOS prompt press Ctrl A.
Select the Disk Utilities -> Select SCSI Channel -> Select the channel and SCSI disk; and do a media check on the failed drives. The utility tries to recover the drive from the failure. Our two drive verifications completed successfully with no errors.
2. Exit out of the Disk utility, and Select Container Configuration Utility from the menu.
3. Select Manage Container from the CCU menu.
If the BIOS has detected a parity error in the selected RAID 5 set, the following help message is displayed at the bottom of the screen.
<Ctrl+R> Restore/Enable RAID 5
4. To repair the selected RAID5 set, press Ctrl R and follow the prompts.
The BIOS will warn you that you may lose data. At this point in time, we didn't have the option ... so we accept the warning.
5. Restart the server, and viola!! -- the server starts boot process. The Windows 2003 server reports media errors, and runs CHKDSK utility. The CHKDSK finds many inconsistencies, and corrects the problem on it's own. The windows starts normally.
This would have been a major grief if we weren't able to recover it, as rebuilding from the backup would have been a nightmare.
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