Dell S100 RAID issue

Django x2

Django x2

Django x2

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Joined
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Hi guys,

Posting here in the hope that a few more people will see it.

Friend rang who runs his own business. His Dell T110 II won't boot, just says no boot media found. Its got 2 x 500 disks in RAID (mirrored) on a software S100 Perc Controller. Going into the PERC management, I can see it says degraded, but it won't tell me which disk. I think it was a power glitch at the house.

Anyway, one disk says Online, the other says ready. You can then make this hot swap and apparently the RAID should rebuild, but because I can't get into Windows I can't install or open Dell Open Manager.

If I try and boot through Windows PE and add the drivers for the S100 controller, I then see the full disk, but not in the repair option, only the "install Windows" option, and I see all 500GB!!!

EEEEK!!

Any help?
 
It's a very long while since I dealt with PERC but when you boot in Windows PE are you seeing the array or one of the drives? Anyway, with a degraded array, you do not want to be installing any software. You should be able to rebuild just from the BIOS. Don't set the drive as a 'Hot swap' but as a 'Hot Spare'.

See this thread: http://commweb-ps3.us.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/t/19448204

But the very first thing to do is tell your mate to invest in a UPS so this problem does not recur.
 
So in Windows PE it didn't show at all, unless I loaded the driver, but then it showed as the full disk space being available (ie, not partitioned up). There's no option to rebuild from the PERC BIOS, only through Open Manager which seems to only be available installed through the OS which I can't access. LOL

So, I set it as Hot Spare, I've booted back to Windows PE, loaded the driver, then did StartRep.exe from an F10 prompt and there's a lot of disk activity and Windows is still on Attempting Repair. I think that is rebuilding now, but I have no way of knowing sadly....
 
In the long run it may just be quicker to wipe the RAID config and re-setup the RAID set then restore it from the backup.

I would probably want to test both disks as well just to be sure they are both good.
 
I always pay extra to get hardware RAID and use SAS disks, so my experience mightn't be completely relevant. I would boot each disk separately to see if there's an OS on either. It sounds like the RAID config might be messed up and one disk isn't part of the virtual disk. I hope he hasn't re-setup the RAID or initialised it. Sometimes it's possible to recover the master file table afterwards, but it's always edge of the seat stuff.
 
if its raid 1 then just stick the drives into another machine, recover the data, bin the one that doesn't work and rebuild :)

The other option would be to install another disk, install os on there and install the dell software and see what mileage that brings but may be worth doing a full block image of each drive before attempting any changes.
 
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When I put the disk (either one) into another machine, they appear as the full 500gb in disk manager, they won't let you explore without formatting first, and most programs (like Recuva) say that the file system is not recognised or invalid.
 
Are you 100% sure they were mirrored? I had to fix a server once where some prat had striped the disks. Are you able to bare metal restore from the backups?

EDIT: Just re-read your post, do they show a partition in disk management? If so try running a check disk, perhaps image them first.
 
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