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Hello,
I apologize for my inexperience with Dell servers.
Our company has 2 PowerEdge R710 servers which I had to do a swap between two servers.
Each server has 2 physical SAS Hard Drives. Each secondary drives are mirrored to the primary drives.
Now, in order to backup the 1st server I had to use the secondary drive from the 2nd server because during that time we did not have a portable drive with enough free space. Once I copied everything and disconnected the drive and proceeded to reinstall the OS on the 1st server.
So, once the 1st server was all finished I connected the drive with all the backup to the 2nd server which was running centos 6.5 to access some required files inside the drive. Once I got into the BIOS the drive with backup was shown as a Foreign Device which I chose "Clear Foreign Configuration" thinking it might just do that and I would be able to access the files I needed. Now here I am with an empty drive lost all the files that was backed up. Later I've sent away the drive to see if it can be recovered, but to no avail.
The drive could not be recovered. Now my question is that is there any chance that files still might be in the mirrored drive in 1st server? Should I even give it a try?
DELL-Chris H
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November 14th, 2014 05:00
Anar1120,
If the details are as you say, then the information will NOT be recoverable. Let me explain why though. When you rebuilt the server 2 drive into server 1, and then removed the drive you were fine. When you got to the next 2 steps is when the trouble started. When you get a Foreign Configuration in server 2, it is due to the controller seeing that the configuration data on the drive is different from what it see's on itself. When you chose to CLEAR the Foreign it tells the controller to ignore the drives configuration and go with the Raid controllers. When it does that it proceeded to rebuild the array off of the remaining Server 2 drive, not rebuilding the "backup" drive to it. Essentially overwriting the existing information. All that would have been fine until I read the other part, that you already started reinstalling the OS on the system you were wanting to backup. Which if you did a clean install, and not an upgrade, then the data is gone.
Let me know if I misunderstood anything.