URGENT - RAID Failure

hybrid · 17 Sep 2010 at 10:11

Hi all,

Came in this morning to find one of the drives erroring on our RAID5 array. Replacing the drive but the server is failing to boot up stating it has a raid config mismatch. Is it safe for us to create a new config but to KEEP all the data on the drives?

Any help is much appreciated.

Cheers

hybrid · 17 Sep 2010 at 12:49

Thanks for the suggestions, Toughnoodle. This is a real odd one here.

Basically, we have three drives in a RAID5 config and 1 is dying. The one dying has a solid light displaying but no audible alarm. If we leave the server to boot up normally it absolutely crawls through the starting up of Windows then finally blue screens. We know this drive is wrecked and have a spare ready to go in but we get 'Unresolved configuration mismatch between disks and NVRAM on the adapter' when we try to boot up with the new drive installed.

We're just not sure if creating a new config will erase all the data from the drives. We don't want this as we know the data on the drives are good. Any ideas?

Controller: LSI 320-1

hybrid · 17 Sep 2010 at 12:58

Yes it's a custom built server. I've tried ringing LSI but they don't start yet (im guessing it's in America).

Does anyone know if creating that new configuration will erase the data?

hybrid · 17 Sep 2010 at 17:34

Well we are up and running again. What a day!!

LSI Support didnt pick up the phone at all this afternoon. So great support from them i must say, NOT!

Anyway, the way i managed to fix this was to force the damaged drive to go into failure mode. This then caused the two other drives to take over and enabled me to boot into Windows 2003 at full speed. Pulled out the dead disk and replaced with a new drive. The new drive is currently rebuilding itself within Windows.

I still though, can't understand why the RAID alarm hadn't gone off to start with, and why on reboot the controller lost its config. We luckily managed to pull this back off the damaged array and back into the NVRAM. The disk we removed degraded the server to an almost standstill.

Time to bring in the SAN's and crack open the beers.