how to recover a RAID 5 if all the disks are removed.

yeah going after the moving company is a real option. they were given specific instructions to just wrap the servers up and load them. I do have a 2650 I can use to read the drives if I need to.

the other point you make is the raid build is tied to the scsi slot? the Raid didnt just header the disk, it did tie its location to the Raid. I wasnt sure about that as I would have never thought to pull all the drives out in the first place. I havent experimentd yet but was wondering if the controller would display any info around that, if so then I could tag each disk one at a time.

as to marking the drives, I have been in this business for 25 years, have moved thousands of servers and this is the first time I have even heard of this happening! its too stupid to even be remotely considered possible, but then here I am!

thanks!

You could send them out for data recovery, which is extremely expensive, but will get all the data back unless the movers damaged something. You have grounds to recover the cost of resurrecting the data from the moving company; paying for a moving service, you have the expectation they understand the very basics of moving computer equipment, not removing disks from machine is one of them....talk to a lawyer.

Or use software such as this to analyze the drive parameters, which will require you to use another machine and a non-raid drive interface...

http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

DO NOT try to figure out the drive order by inserting the drives back into the machines, the odds of getting it correct are virtually nil, and you will destroy the raids in the process.

In the future mark each drives as to machine and backplane slot.

Sadly, worst case scenarios like this can happen. As stated above, if you start slotting drives, it will be like a form of Russin roulette with a very high probability of data corruption. For myself I record the numbers on the drive, the ones that Dell calls a PPID, and then do a nice wire diagram I save. That way no matter what not only do I know what drives go where, but I know which drive to pull and swap if I get a dead one to exchange back to Dell.

I too say you need a lawyer. They tampered with something outside of their contract in express disagreement with the terms of the contract, i.e. wrap them and move them.

"the other point you make is the raid build is tied to the scsi slot?"

Mixing slots is a minor issue as many newer raid adapter allow roaming of drives on the backplane, but drives are also tied to the channel, drives do not roam between channels. If you start mixing drives from both servers you likely to trash both arrays.

I learned the hard way about mixing up slots many years ago, pulled a 5 disk array at 3am, after being up since 6am the previous day, This was an older adapter , with no roaming (two channel), took me 4 hours to figure out the disk sequence by trial and error, and I was lucky, odds were it should have taken longer. With 10 disks, from two machine, I would not even dream about trial and error method.

I was never able to view  individual drives on a raid adapter without screwing them up, maybe someone has... I would attach each drive individually to a standard adapter with an adapter on the drive to convert SCA to SCSI cable. 

I only have one channel so thats safe, so what I am hearing is if I can get the disks seperated so that each group of 5 is correct for that server, what slot they were in is not an issue? again this is a PE 2550, so not exacty the latest in raid tech.

Just looked up the specs on the 2550, your likely to have the Perc 3di, which does not appear to have drive roaming ability, so slot placement is critical.

wow thanks! yeah just my luck, so looks like my options have gone to just about none. buy the software or ship it out for someone else.

Call or email Runtime....

You have options, at least your situation does not involve physical head crashes,  a water submered server or a lightning induced failure.

yup! I am emailing them today with my delima.

Perhaps you have log file/system reports on a backup tape which could identify which drives belong to each of the servers?