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jparnell4864
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March 4th, 2016 11:00
HDD fun
So, long story short our Dell PowerEdge T420 was in place when I came into my position. The person who set it up (and was most knowledgeable about it) was the person I replaced. Managing servers was not part of the job description, and he kind of just did it because he could.
It was originally set up with 2x 2TB disks in RAID1. I convinced my manager to purchase 2 more 2TB disks for simple storage that we could lose if needed (MDT backup and VMWare storage). These were not in RAID. Put them in the carrier, slid the in, format, and bingo, it worked.
One of the RAID disks failed, so we swapped it out, set the new one as a Global Hot Spare, and let it re-mirror. During this process, we removed the two non-RAID drives so that we wouldn't accidentally set them to hot spare.
When putting them back in, Server 2008 R2 will not recognize the drives are present. BIOS can see them, OMSA can see the devices connected, nothing in the Disk Management under Windows.
The controller is PERC S110. BIOS version is 2.4.2.
The BIOS menu is scary and unfamiliar, and I don't trust myself to stumble around to a solution without wiping everything.
Where would I go to make sure that these drives aren't disabled in the BIOS? Or what further troubleshooting could I perform to get these drives back?
theflash1932
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Posted March 5th, 2016 21:00
In the S110 controller utility during POST, you may have the option to import a foreign configuration or to activate an inactive VD. I make it a point never to use the S-series controllers, so I'm not as familiar with exactly what you will see, but assuming the configs weren't wiped accidentally during this process, there should be an option similar to these. If somewhere along the way you deleted the foreign configuration(s), then you won't have many options with non-RAID disks. You should also be able to do this from OMSA.
jparnell4864
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Posted March 8th, 2016 05:00
There wasn't an option in either OMSA or in the S110 controller to import a configuration. However, I did find out that hooking up the drives to a SATA to USB adapter, I could read the files. I backed them up to an external just in case, however, that wasn't needed.
Going into the controller (CTRL + R during boot when prompted), I saw 3 virtual disks, one with my RAID1, and the other two with my standalones. The status of the standalones was FAILED. I deleted the two failed virtual disks and when it done a rescan, it re-created the virtual scheme for those disks. Then I went to "Continue Boot" and Server 2008 R2 recognized the disk, and even kept the custom drive letters and all the data.
I thought that would have been the process from the beginning, but I was nervous that it would wipe the drives, or at least make the data unreadable by the OS.
jparnell4864
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Posted March 4th, 2016 12:00
Ok, may have found a bit more info to go along with this. I am getting following in the alert logs:
2056 Fri Mar 04 15:20:11 2016 Storage Service Virtual disk failed: Virtual Disk 2 (NONE) Controller 0 (PERC S110)
2056 Fri Mar 04 15:20:11 2016 Storage Service Virtual disk failed: Virtual Disk 3 (NONE) Controller 0 (PERC S110)
The ID indicates:
Description: Virtual disk failed.
Severity: Critical / Failure / Error
Cause and Action
Cause: One or more physical disks included in the virtual disk have failed. If the virtual disk is non-redundant (does not use mirrored or parity data), then the failure of a single physical disk can cause the virtual disk to fail. If the virtual disk is redundant, then more physical disks have failed than can be rebuilt using mirrored or parity information.
Action: Create a new virtual disk and restore from a backup.
Is there really no way to regain the existing virtual disks and keep the data? Or will creating a new virtual disk maintain the data on the drives? Is my only option basically to format and start over?