Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of cie123
cie123

asked on

Poweredge 2400 Raid 5 Array Dead. Is it recoverable?

I have a Dell Poweredge 2400 server with 4 scsi drives. The 0 drive is the c drive and drives 1, 2, and 3 are Set up Raid 5 as the D: drive. We lost power on Friday in an ice storm. The UPS worked and I did a controlled shutdown. Later when the power came back on I tried rebooting and I found that directory services (win 2K server) would not load due to a full disk. Today I had a freind take care of that. I did swap the 3 drive and put it back after rebooting with no effect. Now that we can boot again there is no sign of the D: drive in windows. When we go into the SCSI utility on boot it recognizes all three drives but sais container 0 OK and Container 1 dead. All the drives are OK according to there status lights and seem to be running normally. I have not done anything else to possibly corrupt or overwrite the data. All I need is my Quickbooks file (very important) which is about 20mg. Is this recoverable?  Help!!!
Avatar of digicidal
digicidal
Flag of United States of America image

http://docs.us.dell.com/docs/storage/perc2sc/2781e/en/conf_mgr.htm

^ Can start there, but I'd be lying if I said that things are going to be just fine.  I love RAIDs when they work correctly and nothing fails data-wise (ie a drive goes, but rebuilding on a fresh one is smooth).  I'd double check the seating of the drives themselves since possibly there is a power issue to one or more, but if the FAST configuration program shows 1,2,3 as being up and working, but shows the array itself as missing, things aren't too good.  I'd do more searching on http://support.dell.com if you can find more descriptive error messages, etc... that might allow a better search through the knowledge base.

Good luck!  (And if I find any more info I'll forward that on to you here.)
Avatar of Luc Franken
I think you're pretty much out of luck recovering the data yourself. So I suggest you contact one of these (taken from CrazyOnes list)

Data Recovery Services

http://www.ontrack.com/datarecovery/
Ontrack offers a full range of data recovery solutions to address your data loss needs. Unlike other data recovery companies, Ontrack provides exclusive and patented solutions that do not require you to send in your media for recovery. In situations where the hardware is functioning normally, our patented Remote Data Recovery service and EasyRecovery software solutions can solve your data loss needs safely and effectively in a matter of hours. If another company claims that there is no alternative to shipping your drive, it's because they don't offer an alternative. For situations in which the hardware is physically failing, our In-Lab services will utilize our Class 100 clean-rooms to retrieve your mission critical data.

FLAT RATE DATA RECOVERY PRICING INCLUDES!
http://www.i-t-s.com/datarec/datarec_pricing.htm 

Total Recall
http://www.recallusa.com/
Our recovery and forensic technology is used by support and call centers as well as data recovery providers world-wide.

ESS Data Recovery
http://www.savemyfiles.com/
ESS Data Recovery, Inc. has been removing barriers in the data recovery and computer forensics market ever since its inception

Good luck,

LucF
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Luc Franken
Luc Franken
Flag of Netherlands image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of cie123
cie123

ASKER

It recognizes Raid 5 and all three drives. It just sais container dead in the setup. During boot it recognizes the boot container and posts OK and the second container is recognized and gives a status unknown. In any case Windows does not see the d drive.
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
I don't think there's much you can do yourself, you might even loose all your data if you do something wrong. I really suggest you try to contact ontrack or a similar company to recover the data for you.

LucF
I don't deal with dell, mostly IBM, in their raid configuration program, you can ask it to pull the config files from the hd. If you have this option try that, and it will reload your controler card and tell it about the d array.