Recovering a RAID setup from dead server

Over Clocker · 7 Dec 2010 at 10:44

Hi guys,

Say you have a server with a RAID card and a raid 1 array in it. The server has failed (dead motherboard). If we remove the card and drives and put them directly into a different server, what are the chances of the array staying intact? Purely for some data recovery.

Cheers!

Mal

Sp00n · 7 Dec 2010 at 11:22

What model of server is it? I know, for instance, the some of the Dell cards (PERc 5/6 iirc) hold the raid information on the drives rather than in the raid memory so you can literally pop the drives in a new server and it will prompt to rebuild from the information.

zetec452 · 7 Dec 2010 at 11:49

As spoon said you will need a similar RAID card or chipset. Best would be to have an identical server.

If the server isn't all that similar you can try with one of the disks. Either way, risky. What OS is it? If you need the data you may be able to mount one of the disks on your PC or another server and get the data off.

Xelene · 7 Dec 2010 at 11:49

If it's the same model of server and you remember to make sure each drive is connected to the same port/channel you should be okay.

Syx · 7 Dec 2010 at 13:07

Being as it's RAID 1 (i.e. mirrored) - my understanding there was that in theory you could just take one of the drives out and run it as a non-RAID array, then build the array up from that point.

I've not done it at server level but in my home PC when I tried to install Vista SP1 it failed - turned out the cause was my mirrored drive had failed. I removed it and deleted the RAID array so I just had one disk; it booted fine and SP1 installed happily.

unclepablo · 7 Dec 2010 at 13:23

If you remove the drives and the card (as you said) then I would have thought it would be intact assuming no damage to the RAID card when MB went pop.

morfmedia · 7 Dec 2010 at 19:19

If you can put it in identical hardware that's ideal. Done it plenty of times with older gen HP kit (G4/G5).

Might be worth just using one disk as above so you have two copies of the data....

PistolPete · 7 Dec 2010 at 20:54

There is a good chance both disks are fine, so simply pop 1 into another machine and back it up. Being in a RAID1 array is irrelevant.

Xelene · 7 Dec 2010 at 22:01

Didn't spot the RAID1 thing. Yeah you can just take one and build a new mirror from it. My advice about sticking things on the same ports/channels of a same model RAID controller was mostly aimed at porting RAID5/6 arrays between machines.