Dead Raid x 2 - what can I do?

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Jonesie

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#99984 31-Mar-2012 11:45

Hi

I acquired an old server from a now ex employer about a year ago and it's been working sweetly. So sweetly in fact that I neglected to check it for some time. You guessed it, the raid boot partition has failed. Worse than that, the 2nd raid storeage array also has a failed drive.

So, now I cant boot it and I cant even use another boot drive to get at the storage drive (with my 'backups').

The server is a cloney thing with a gigabyte mother board. The boot drive is a promise controller with 4 drives. The storage array is using the onboard nvidia raid with 3 x 2TB WD drives.

As far as I can tell the Promise raid has 2 drives that have failed. Worse case scenario, I can live with losing that but it would be nice to recover it or at least get some data off it.

The storage array has one fautly disk but I have a spare one ready for that, if I can get the machine to boot somehow.

The problem is, there are no spare sata ports - the mb only has 4 - 3 of them are used by he nvidia array and the 4th is for the cd.

Does anyone know of a boot image I can use on a usb stick that will let me recover either or both of these raid arrays?

Thanks

Ragnor

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#603019 31-Mar-2012 19:55

Can you can read the motherboard model off the motherboard? Usually it's printed on board somewhere.

If you can determine the motherboard model, then you can look up the model/chipset of the storage raid (nvidia raid), then you can try find a bootable rescue cd/usb that will let you access the nvidia array (ie: has drivers for that raid chipset).

networkn

Networkn
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#603040 31-Mar-2012 20:16

Unless you are running hot spares or mirrored arrays, 2 drives failing in a single array is fatal, I hope you had backups.

Jonesie

22 posts

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#603178 1-Apr-2012 09:04

Hi

I turns out it's the promise controller that has failed. My wife figured this out with a bit cable swapping (she's the hardware half of my team). Once we replace that, we should be able to rebuild the on board nVidia array... in theory.

The controller aint cheap in NZ tho. It's a TX4310 4 port sata. Pricespy lists one supplier at $260+ ish but no one has any stock. I can see them in US$ for about half that.

Sigh...

Thanks all.

Lias

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#603359 1-Apr-2012 16:45

Assuming you have a truckload of spare disk to play with, rebuild the array in software with UFS Explorer and copy all the data out.

Worked for me twice due to tanked controllers.

http://www.ufsexplorer.com/download_stdrr.php

I'm a geek, a gamer, a dad, a Quic user, and an IT Professional. I have a full rack home lab, size 15 feet, an epic beard and Asperger's. I'm a bit of a Cypherpunk, who believes information wants to be free and the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. If you use my Quic signup you can also use the code R570394EKGIZ8 for free setup.

Jonesie

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#603827 2-Apr-2012 13:47

That looks like a cool tool - but at 100 euro I may as well just get the new controller.

Thanks matey.