Re: RAID 10 recovery question


"RAIDwoes" <sbraudrick@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1181573788.308477.38620@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm hoping someone will see this and set my mind at ease.

I have a Dell PE 2600 with 6 73GB 15k SCSI drives on a PERC 4/Di
controller arranged as follows:

Physical Disks:
Disks 0 & 1 = RAID 1 (OS partition, Server2003)
Disks 2 & 3 = RAID 0 (Array 1)
Disks 4 & 5 = RAID 0 (Array 2)

Logical Drives:
0 = OS partition
1 = RAID 1 (Array1 & Array 2)

Here's what happened and the issue I am having:

When moving the server from one rack to another the BIOS lost its
settings, evidently the battery was dead.

The BIOS showed the Integrated controller in SCSI mode instead of RAID
mode.

To ensure I didn't lose any of the data on physical disks 2 - 5, I
numbered and removed them from the server.

Then I replaced the battery and checked to make sure the BIOS was
holding the settings even in a no-power situation. After I confirmed
that I changed the mode to RAID and the machine restarted.

When I booted into the RAID configuration, disk 1 showed as "FAILED",
so I rebuilt it and then rebooted.

This time the machine booted into Server 2003 without a hitch, so I
shut it down and then re-inserted disks 2 - 5 and powered the machine
back on. Server 2003 started with no problems but could not see the
logical drive 1.

I rebooted into the RAID configuration. Disks 2 & 3 show "FAILED" and
disks 4 & 5 show "ONLINE". The RAID controller will not allow me to
rebuild disks 2 or 3.

If my understanding is correct, disks 4 & 5 should be a striped set
that contain all information of the mirrored set of disks 2 & 3. In
theory at least, this should be a recoverable state, but I don't want
to monkey around and end up losing the data on logical drive 1 since
it contains newly installed software that (as you may have guessed)
has not been backed up yet.

Any ideas, thoughts, or resources that you may offer will be greatly
appreciated.


Not really a help suggestion but why RAID 10 ? why not RAID 1 on disks 0+1
and then RAID 5 on disks 2+3+4 and then have disk 6 as a hot spare? giving
the same amount of disk space as in your RAID 10 but then still having a hot
spare to cover redundancy on either your O/S RAID or your Apps RAID?



By the way have you tried swapping disks 2+3 they are in the right slots?


.

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