How many power-cycles does it take to get to the center of2850-cicle? [Or how does one recover RAID from a toasted box]

[Harald_Jensas at Dell.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com [mailto:linux-poweredge-
> bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Stephen John Smoogen
> Sent: 09 February 2008 01:08
> To: linux-poweredge-Lists
> Subject: How many power-cycles does it take to get to the center
> of2850-cicle? [Or how does one recover RAID from a toasted box]
> 
> Well we may just have found out. Our nagios found one of our remote
> servers non-responsive and when we got over there, the box was in an
> interesting state. The UPS had gone bad an was power cycling the box
> every second. We figure it had about 1200-1600 power cycles before we
> got to the system and turned off the UPS.
> 
> Suprisingly the system had not catch on fire like I had seen older
> machines do with that kind of abuse. It also was able to boot up to
> BIOS and try and do a PXE boot which was a lot more than I was
> expecting. However it no longer sees all of its memory and its RAID
> controller does not see any of the disk drives in it anymore. My plan
> is to try and recover the data by moving the disks over to a working
> system... but beyond that I am guessing if there is anyway to get the
> other raid controller to detect the old raid setup. I have done a
> simple google search and not come up with much (my google-foo is
> lacking it would seem).
> 
> Are there any recovery how-to's out there for recovering RAID on a
> Perc4 controller?
> 

I do not know of a how-to, but if the disks are OK and you move them to another system with the same controller the PERC 4 should be able to read the RAID config from the drives.

If that does not work you can try to recreate the exact same config in the RAID Controller Configuration Utility. Just be careful and never ever do an initialization of your Virtual Disk.



Regards
Harald Jensås