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Bootable Virtual Disk Offline on PowerEdge 2970
I have a PowerEdge 2970 with two Virtual Disks. The bootable Virtual Disk 0 which is Offline is a RAID 5 with disks 01, 02, 03 which all show Online. The Virtual disk 1 which shows Degraded is made up of disk 04 online and should also have disk 00 but instead says Missing. Physical disk 00 is the one that went bad and has been replaced with a new disk the same size and speed. On both Virtual Disks in the Configuration Utility the only Operations not grayed out are Delete and Properties. I don’t have the option to check or rebuild either of the Virtual disks. On the PD Mgmt page of the utility it shows physical disk 00 as Ready and disks 01through 04 as Online. The ESXi server won’t boot past the choice of reboot or go into Setup. How can I get Virtual Disk 0 back Online and recover Virtual Disk 1 from Degaded? This server has a Perc 6/i integrated controller. All disks have green lights on the front and appear to found.
Please offer ideas, Mark.
DELL-Josh Cr
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January 20th, 2016 16:00
Hi,
Do you have a backup? There are some things that we can try to get it back to running, but the data may be gone. The drive configuration with the RAID 5 on drives 1-3 as the boot drive and drives 0 and 4 as a RAID 1 is not typical. Is there are reason it is configured like this? We can try to boot to our live image http://www.dell.com/support/contents/us/en/19/article/Product-Support/Self-support-Knowledgebase/enterprise-resource-center/Enterprise-Tools/support-live-image
and see if there is data on the arrays. The degraded RAID 1 should still have data and setting the ready drive as a hotspare will probably allow it to rebuild.
Mbourke1
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January 21st, 2016 12:00
I was able to change the new drive to a hot spare and rebuild the RAID 1 on the virtual disk 1 that is not the bootable one. I created the DVD and booted to it and ran OpenMange Server Administrator as suggested. It shows the bootable virtual disk 0 as degraded and the only tasks available are Delete, Blink, and Unblink. All three drives in that RAID 5 are listed as Online with the task choices of Blink or Unblink. Is there someway I can get that RAID 5 back Online?
DELL-Josh Cr
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January 21st, 2016 12:00
If the virtual disk is showing degraded that should mean that there is a missing drive, but if there are only 3 drives and they are all online it should not be degraded. Can you post screenshots of what it shows? There may be some drive corruption. You may need to reinstall.
DELL-Josh Cr
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January 22nd, 2016 13:00
From the image it looks like it thinks that 0:0 and 0:4 are missing from the raid 5 and with two drives missing it is offline. Do you have a backup?
Mbourke1
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January 22nd, 2016 13:00
Here is a picture of the configuration utility before I added the 00 drive to virtual disk 1 and was able to rebuild that one. The configuration utility shows the RAID 5 as Offline and the OpenManage Server I booted to shows it as Degraded. Is there any aftermarket tool I can use to get the RAID 5 back online?
DELL-Josh Cr
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January 22nd, 2016 15:00
Windows is not going to be able to read esx partitions. You may want to try deleting and recreating the raid 5 with the same settings it has now.
Mbourke1
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January 22nd, 2016 15:00
My backup is very old so I really need to try to save the RAID 5 drives. It is a ESXi server with a couple of virtual servers on it. I tried changing the virtual disk 1 to the bootable disk and it will boot to Server 2003 and let me log on if that might help any kind of recovery ideas. What do you think?
DELL-Josh Cr
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January 22nd, 2016 16:00
You would want to go to a data recovery company, anything we do at this point is a risk.
Mbourke1
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January 22nd, 2016 16:00
Thanks for your help. Do you know any methods at all that I may be able to repair the RAID 5 or retrieve the data on it?
Mbourke1
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January 27th, 2016 10:00
Like you told me before from looking at the picture I uploaded the RAID 5 thinks that disk 00:00 and 00:04 are missing but they were never part of that RAID 5. Is there any way to tell it that those disks are not part of the RAID5? Any configuration settings that could be changed?
Mbourke1
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January 27th, 2016 11:00
I have a screen shot from OpenManage Server Administrator. Any chance that any of the choices for the Perc 6i Integrated controller could help?
1 Attachment
IMG_0895.JPG
DELL-Josh Cr
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January 27th, 2016 13:00
Exporting the controller log may help.
Bacon Emperor
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January 27th, 2016 15:00
There two possible ways I can think of to salvage your RAID 5:
1. Retag the RAID 5
This involves recreating the RAID 5 with the same settings. You will need to delete the current RAID 5 and then create a new RAID 5 using drives 1, 2 and 3. After you create it, it is important that you DO NOT initialise the drives, otherwise the data is gone for good.
2. Force the controller to pick up a foreign configuration
May not work, but you can try reseating the drives and see if the controller picks up a foreign config. If it does, you can try importing the foreign config.
I find it odd how a single drive failure on your RAID 1 VD 1 would cause the RAID 5 to go offline.