problems retrieving data from failed PowerEdge 1750 w/RAID

[J. Epperson]

On Fri, May 1, 2009 08:58, Aaron Krowne wrote:
> Yes, I've now confirmed that the array does not get read/scanned properly
>  at all... see the log error messages.
>
> -Aaron
>
> On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 6:35 AM, Tino Schwarze
> <linux-poweredge.lists at tisc.de
>> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 01:06:57PM -0400, Aaron Krowne wrote:
>>> Can anyone advise on this?  I just need to know if I need to replace
>> the bad
>>> drive on the array to get it to mount again, or if there is likely
>> some
>>> other problem.  I don't want to buy another drive when I'm just
>>> trying
>> to
>>> recover the data off the good drive.
>>
>> Have you tried booting without the failed drive? It looks like the
>> drive blocks something. And the RAID-1 should work with a missing
>> drive.
>>

IIRC from the OP this is a PERC/4.  Although I've seen PERC/4s fail to
boot from a RAID-1 in which drive 0 has failed (bug known to Dell, I
think), your situation looks like a problem with the megaraid driver
talking to or through the controller.  Does the PERC BIOS setup program
show you a degraded RAID-1 container, with one drive failed and one
online?  What kind of prompts/dialogue are you getting from the PERC as it
POSTs up and loads firmware?  Is it squawking about the config, like NVRAM
not matching COD?  It would appear that you should have empty drive slots;
have you tried moving the drives around to see if there's an indication of
a slot/backplane issue?

Sorry if some/all of this has already been posted.  The posts are
liberally snipped and I don't have the attention span I used to have.