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nflnetwork29

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failed raid. server will not boot. help.

I need help urgent. Have a failed server. Two failed drives. Raid 5.

8 total disks. Can I recover?
IBM server. Mega raid m 5015 adapter.

Please help
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rindi
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Turn off ALL the hardware, and contact a data recovery firm.  Even applying power to the HDDs risk damage.  You have an excellent chance of getting all your data back with professional recovery.

Be prepared for something in the $5000 - $10000 range.  Sorry.
Not looking good.

My advice is to reseat the drives if they are hotswap and hope that maybe it was a connection problem.

What type (make and model ) drives?

Some manufactures have diags that can fix some errors on their hard disks and make them usable until you can do a swap and rebuild.
I write such diagnostic software professionally.  Some things can be fixed entirely with software and damage can be limited, then again if you have chunks of metal flying around inside the canister at 10K RPM then you need the guys in the bunny suits.

It all depends on what is wrong.  the problem YOU have is that you need somebody like me with the hardware and software to determine the failure, let alone the training.

If the data is valuable, then forcing the drives online may result in additional corruption if you force the WRONG drive online, even if the disks are healthy and condition is transient.

Maybe the system ran degraded when drive A died, then drive B died a few days later.  If you force A online, then your data is going to be corrupted with ZERO chance of getting it back the moment it boots up.

If you force A&B online, you corrupt data.
If you force B online, then you'll have minor corruption, or very little, but don't have the means to find out.

Log files will help. If you don't have them, then personally I would forget it, unless you have nothing to lose, then guess and hope for the best.    
(But I would use another PC to take a binary image of all 8 disks for safe keeping ... but even that is risky because the two disks that failed might have the only copy of data you need and the mere stress of reading will do more damage).
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nflnetwork29

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Should i try reseating the drives? 1 drive or both drives ?
That won't hurt. Go for it.  Both drives. The controller won't arbitrarily choose to do the wrong thing ... that is what "forcing" is for, to force the controller to make a decision that would put your data at risk, in situation where the controller is wrong.

Or more correctly, when controller is being overly conservative.
I would reseat all the drives.

Troubleshooting 101.

I've had slots in backplanes go bad just as often as drives.

Their is a fair chance that the back plane could be the issue.

I would exhaust the simple fixes first.
tried reseating all 8 drives. same result.
That controller also does support drive roaming, so you could leave the system on, but stay at the megaraid BIOS, and hot swap disks to different bays.  This will tell you if the problem is with the HDD or the Bay.

BUT REMEMBER - You do not know the nature of the problem with the drives.  Applying power could cause further damage.  So again, if the data is worth significantly more than the price of recovery, then the correct course of action is to call in a pro.
P.S. it is maybe 1000:1 against the backplane or controller failing unless somebody is inside that box a lot and swapping out disks.
tried spinning up a live recovery vm and now am getting the following error.

“STOP: c00002e2 Directory Services could not start because of the following error: A device attached to the system is not functioning.

Error Status: 0xc0000001. Please shutdown this system and reboot into Directory Services Restore Mode, check the event log for more detailed information.”
live recovery vm?

Who's?
Storagecraft ,Vmware,M$,Acronis?
storagecraft