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CaptainFuture

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Disk unreadable after RAID Controller BIOS and NVRAM downgrade

HI!

Our hardware vendor downgraded the BIOS of our Adaptec 3200 S SCSI controllers before adding a second SCSI controller in each node of our W2K cluster in order to achieve a configuration supported by the hardware vendor.

Now Windows wont read the disks and disk manager shows the status "unreadable".

The RAID Drives are recognized as optimal by the controller BIOS and are recognized by Windows as RAID 5 Drives in device manager.

In the first configuration after the upgrade, the SCSI controller id of the RAID controller in question was raised from 0 to 1. Changing the sequence of controller ids had no favorable effect on the disk status.

Does anybody have an idea about how we could regain the drives ?

We have a backup, but we could lose a certain amount of data.

The drives and partitions are all visible in Symantec Volume Manager and pass integrity checks.
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Lee W, MVP
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Re-upgrade the BIOS?
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CaptainFuture

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Oh, by the way, we downgraded the NVRAM, too, although without resetting it.

We downgraded only one cluster node to see if it works.

The other node wont read the disks anymore, too.

I thought of trying to repair the MPT, but so far I#ve only found DiskProbe, which sound neither easy nor realiable. Does anyone have any experience here ?
Verify the installed drivers are compatible with the downgraded bios.  A lot of RAID firmware/driver combos are dependant on each other.  If the BIOS reports it as ok, it's likely an incompatible driver.  check at www.adaptec.com for Drivers that are compatible with your current downgraded BIOS.

--Serp
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datarecoveryman

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Thanks, we'll give R-TT a try and get back to You
R-Studio recognizes the drives and partitions, but shows: "device not ready (21)" error when trying to scan either the shared disks or the volumes thereupon.
The drivers are certified with the firmware
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The versions are almost equal, the newer BIOS only adds support for large disks, which was not necessary for our disk configuration.
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Thanks guys, we had to rebuild the RAID and restore the backups in order to have people working Monday morning.

Thanks for the good advice.