RAID Card Died, HELP!

[FXGuy3369]

My friend is a dentist and they have an old PowerEdge 1900. They had a power outage recently and it stopped booting. I am pretty savvy but minimal server experience. Upon booting it the RAID controller was reading no logical drives. (There are 3 in there, RAID 5). We ordered an exact make model replacement card off ebay, put it in, now it sees the drives, but does not see the RAID setup as it was. Any recommendations on a way we can image the RAID array with the PC not booting? All 3 drives pass a SMART test. I know Acronis can image RAID from within Windows, but I assume not from the boot disc if the RAID card isn't reading it correctly?

 

[frowertr]

So the new controller detects the 3 physical drives but doesn't recognize the existing RAID 5 array? How does the new controller show they are currently configured?

How did you run the SMART test on the three drives?

 

[FXGuy3369]

We pulled the drives one by one and used a dock to SMART test. The new controller sees 3 drives but after further looking it shows 1 drive logical 2 drives foreign

 

[master_shake_]

scan for foreign arrays and attempt to import it.

can you post a screen shot of the raid bios?

 

[nanaki333]

the drives are still recognized in the bios/raid bios? re-add the array with no initialization if an option exists for "recovery". what raid card is it? if cheap enough or if you have a spare you can try moving it in case the card itself is bad.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

If the raid card is same model/firmware, it should work, provided the drives are good and the raid metadata on the drives isn't corrupted.

But thhere might be some extra steps to import an old raid volume. If you haven't gone through the manual with a fine-toothed comb, do so now.

I'm assuming restoring from backups isn't an option here?

 

[nanaki333]

If the raid card is same model/firmware, it should work, provided the drives are good and the raid metadata on the drives isn't corrupted.

But thhere might be some extra steps to import an old raid volume. If you haven't gone through the manual with a fine-toothed comb, do so now.

I'm assuming restoring from backups isn't an option here?

you have to make sure you don't just get click happy. most have that no-initialization for recovery, but it's easy to overlook!.... i know by personal experience.....

 

[COPOHawk]

I am pretty familiar with dell servers. Which perc card...5 or 6? Also, is there a good backup that you can restore from?

 

[nanaki333]

So I updated my BIOS and it reset back from RAID to AHCI, which usually isn't a big deal; reboot, set back, done. Windows 10, however, grabs the first available drive in the array and automatically overwrites the boot record and shows as unformatted at the size of the full array. So yeah, screwed.

I used a program called ReclaiMe and loaded all drives in the array in their raw, unformatted state and it was able to detect ALL data for me to copy from. Saves me the trouble of the slow download of all my Steam games!

Anyway, check it out. May help you. It supports RAID1,0,5 & 6.

EDIT: Make sure to plug all drives direct in to a motherboard, and not use the RAID card. The software will find the array and all data. Took mine about 2 hours and change before it found everything on a 3x1TB SSD RAID0 array.