Replaced failing drive in RAID 5 Array now almost all folders are empty
My supervisor replaced a failing drive we had in our RAID 5 array on our PE2900 xmas eve,. I come in today and go to browse the network shares we have for that array and all folders are empty but the free/available space is the same as it was prior to replacing the bad drive, just now no data, but the drive we replaced now has an orange LED. I cannot restart the server for a few hours as people are using one of the VMs that's hosted in Hyper-V.
Any idea how to fix this? I've never seen this before. It's a PERC 6/i controller.
Any idea how to fix this? I've never seen this before. It's a PERC 6/i controller.
Paul MacDonald
Should the array have rebuilt itself?
How EXACTLY did your supervisor replace the failing drive? What steps did he take? This can be very important - and could have wiped out the data if done incorrectly.
What are your disk and RAID configurations?
What are your disk and RAID configurations?
You experienced a multiple failure scenario. Nothing you can do but hire a pro or restore from backup. Even having the system powered on insures additional data destruction.
Going rate for RAID recovery is $1000 - $1500 PER DISK DRIVE in a rAID config, BTW, so use that to work out whether you restore or go to a professional recovery firm.
P.S. Since a rebuild was involved, be prepared for the worse. Your data may be gone forever or hopelessly corrupted to the point where too much was overwritten to enable you to get any file > your stripe size.
Every moment that system is powered up to windows makes things worse too, so if you plan on attempting recovery, shut it down now and go for it. It won't get any better on it's own, so you should minimize damage by turning it off and keeping it off.
Going rate for RAID recovery is $1000 - $1500 PER DISK DRIVE in a rAID config, BTW, so use that to work out whether you restore or go to a professional recovery firm.
P.S. Since a rebuild was involved, be prepared for the worse. Your data may be gone forever or hopelessly corrupted to the point where too much was overwritten to enable you to get any file > your stripe size.
Every moment that system is powered up to windows makes things worse too, so if you plan on attempting recovery, shut it down now and go for it. It won't get any better on it's own, so you should minimize damage by turning it off and keeping it off.
ASKER
@poweredgetech - Powered down the server, replaced the drive, turned server back on
We had 6 disks in a RAID 5 (one of them was a spare) at some point while I was away from the organization (roughly 13 months) the spare drive failed, and then a week before I came back he said he was experiencing issues with the drive we replaced.
@Dlethe - I hope this is not the case.
We had 6 disks in a RAID 5 (one of them was a spare) at some point while I was away from the organization (roughly 13 months) the spare drive failed, and then a week before I came back he said he was experiencing issues with the drive we replaced.
@Dlethe - I hope this is not the case.
So you lost three drives in your RAID5? The spare should have kicked in when the first one died. The spare died at some point (leaving you with no spare). Then the most recent one died?
ASKER
no, we lost 1 so we no longer had a spare, then another one started having issues and he swapped out that one.
We only lost 2 drives and replaced 1 of them.
We only lost 2 drives and replaced 1 of them.
Shadowless127 .. this IS the case. You improperly replaced a drive, so it is actually possible that your RAID never did get rebuilt in the first place and you were degraded all that time, and metadata was never properly written. So when you put in a replacement drive, it finally kicked off a rebuild and interleaved data from the drive you put in 13 months ago and spread it around. This corrupted every block you had.
Damage is massive, but actually it could be recovered with lost data limited to the blocks that have changed since the rebuild.
But turn it off, really, nothing you can do and there is no software you can buy (retail) that will fix this up for you.
Damage is massive, but actually it could be recovered with lost data limited to the blocks that have changed since the rebuild.
But turn it off, really, nothing you can do and there is no software you can buy (retail) that will fix this up for you.
Hard to know what happened when it was powered on with a replacement drive, it could have had metadata on it or it might have been blank. I'd have a look at it with getdataback and see if it's just the MFT gone corrupt although any attempt at repair could make things worse.
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Nahh, realistically based on additional information you are looking at situation where when you built the RAID and the XOR data was virgin, you had a mirror copy of the first chunk of data in a chunk that was in parity area for the first stripe. Then that disk stripe went offline so it was protected from change. (Or disk was marked bad, or you had a puncture, or one of other issues.
But now, after moving things around and rebuilding, that parity chunk got moved to non-parity area. . sorry getting too deep to explain w/o a graph, and it really is moot. Suffice to say what was once stale XOR parity block now is logical block zero. If it happened to one block, it happened to more than one block. You can figure this out with a binary editor and take the NTFS apart, but that is too big of a pain to walk somebody through and you would need a non-RAID controller and have to determine the proper offsets to even do this.
That information wouldn't be of any value except to a person doing recovery, or just for the satisfaction of determining root cause. If you want to learn root cause one could programmatically extract the controller's event log (which is volatile, by the way, so don't power off if you *really* want it). If you were running the mrsas program from Dell at the time this all happened, you would have this information. If you weren't, then Dell won't do it for you, and only people who could get it would be an LSI engineer or somebody like my company that has the NDA programming info. (No not volunteering / trolling for consulting, It wouldn't do you any good anyway because even then it wouldn't provide enough information for a recovery)
But now, after moving things around and rebuilding, that parity chunk got moved to non-parity area. . sorry getting too deep to explain w/o a graph, and it really is moot. Suffice to say what was once stale XOR parity block now is logical block zero. If it happened to one block, it happened to more than one block. You can figure this out with a binary editor and take the NTFS apart, but that is too big of a pain to walk somebody through and you would need a non-RAID controller and have to determine the proper offsets to even do this.
That information wouldn't be of any value except to a person doing recovery, or just for the satisfaction of determining root cause. If you want to learn root cause one could programmatically extract the controller's event log (which is volatile, by the way, so don't power off if you *really* want it). If you were running the mrsas program from Dell at the time this all happened, you would have this information. If you weren't, then Dell won't do it for you, and only people who could get it would be an LSI engineer or somebody like my company that has the NDA programming info. (No not volunteering / trolling for consulting, It wouldn't do you any good anyway because even then it wouldn't provide enough information for a recovery)
ASKER
@PoweredgeTech - My boss for some reason thinks global hot spare is the same as hot swap and since we didnt have a GHS powered it down. I run this exact same machine at home, and have always hot swapped with no problem.
We were able to get back to normal after a reboot and forcing the new drive online. We will be putting in a GHS tomorrow for safety.
We were able to get back to normal after a reboot and forcing the new drive online. We will be putting in a GHS tomorrow for safety.
I almost asked that very question ... what was your/his interpretation of "spare". Don't you hate having to educate your boss? I would.