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wednesday11

2 Posts

14995

July 11th, 2007 07:00

Raid configuration recovery

Hi all.
I have very little experience with raid in general, and have been presented with 3 fully populated 660F units. The data stored on these devices is critical, and the origional owner of these devices is not available to help with the configuration.
So far, I have configured a PC with a Qlogic 2200 card, and have attached the 660F units through a fiber switch. From within Windows 2000, I can see all 42 disk drives - indicating to me that so far everything might work.
I have loaded the Dell array manager software, but it won't see the array for some reason. Having done a bit more research, I wonder if I need to load the Dell storage consolidation software? Reading between the lines, the guide seems to imply that the storage software would have previously held the raid configuration (I know all these volumes were configured as one raid 5 volume), and is therefore lost.
My question is, can anyone provide me with some guidance as to how to re-establish the raid configuration given the lack of available details and missing config?
This is an important legal issue, and it would be a great loss if the volumes cannot be recovered. Any help would be well received. My natural environment is with Unix, and am struggling to work this thru under Windows - Thanks in advance

pcmeiners

4 Operator

 • 

1.8K Posts

July 11th, 2007 13:00

Not familiar with the hardware but from a quick search you appear to have these drives on a standard SCSI adapter. Sounds like they were on a hardware raid adapter, as only a fool would do OS based raid on an array this size. You would need to have the drives on a raid adapter, the same manufacturer,  the same series and preferably the same firmware as the raid was created on in the first place; the order of placement of the 660f units on the raid channels may be critical. Do not attempt to initialize, manipulate, or move (reorder) the physical drives on the present adapter/660fs, as you will loose all data. If all else fails, there is always data recovery services, at unreasonable prices. If you have no information as to the raid adapter they were on, perhaps a low level disk editor, in read only mode, could be used to find some raid info from the disks.
 
 
 
 

tommo666

1 Rookie

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1.2K Posts

July 12th, 2007 12:00

DELL-GaryS

777 Posts

July 12th, 2007 21:00

Hi,
 
  The best advice I can give you, (I used to work with the SANs  seven years ago when they were on the PV650) is to RUN to the phone and call Dell storage support. They have the technicians that are current and trained with the PV660 and the versions of management S/W you need to use to manage the data. They will make sure you get all the F/W and software versions compatible, and working.
 
Yes the data and configuration are stored on the drives. If it comes to it, you may need to spend some serious cash with a data recovery service.
 
Good luck,
Dell-GaryS
 

Richard_Thompso

28 Posts

July 26th, 2007 15:00

The configuration is stored on the Disks.  Are you seeing the PV660 or just 42 individual disks.  if you are seeing 42 individual disk, it means you are not seeing the raid controller.  make sure you have it cabled correctly.

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