Hello, we have an incident where a server with a RAID 5 array has failed. The Raid 5 VD was made up of 8 drives. Two of them failed after a hard boot.
After replacing the drives with new identical drives, I am not able to rebuild the array. The Raid 5 array remains in a failed state. If is not in degraded.
I tried importing foreign disk from one of the old drives but it does not work. The error is
"configuration is not configured. "
Any suggestions on how we can get the array back if possible?
A RAID 5 volume can only tolerate a single drive failure, because it operates using a single distributed parity block per stripe. Unfortunately, I would consider the data lost. However, if this data is critical or hasn't been backed up in a while, you could contact Drive Savers or ACE Data Recovery. I believe both of those companies offer discounts if you tell them that Dell referred you.
If you use Drive Savers, I believe the general process is as follows:
You would send your drives to them, they can determine how much data they can recover, they would then generate a quote for you, then the drives and data would be sent back. I'm not sure about how long it takes, but I think it is a fairly quick process.
@darkog As suggested by Dylan, check if there is back up available.
Verify if the available backup can be restored: Restore the backup to a different location, preferably on a spare drive.
Verify the data after restore. If the data is clean and usable, proceed to the next
Repair the drives in a RAID In case the drives or disks cannot be repaired, then replace them with new disks. Replacing the drives with previously used drives may again create performance related issues. Such a situation is avoidable by testing the drives for performance and certify them for production.
Upload the data on the newly configured RAID.
Test the performance of RAID Array
Or in case of no intact backup, you can go for:
Attach all failed disks to the bootable disk
Recover content to the recoverable storage disk
Replace the existing disk with working drives
Rebuild and configure RAID as a duplicate of the original
Transfer the entire data from the bootable disk to the newly built RAID Array
Recovery should be performed only by Certified Professionals. If above does not help, try RAID recovery tool where you can verify the chance to recover data by using the free preview feature.
Dell-DylanJ
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Posted April 15th, 2019 07:00
A RAID 5 volume can only tolerate a single drive failure, because it operates using a single distributed parity block per stripe. Unfortunately, I would consider the data lost. However, if this data is critical or hasn't been backed up in a while, you could contact Drive Savers or ACE Data Recovery. I believe both of those companies offer discounts if you tell them that Dell referred you.
If you use Drive Savers, I believe the general process is as follows:
You would send your drives to them, they can determine how much data they can recover, they would then generate a quote for you, then the drives and data would be sent back. I'm not sure about how long it takes, but I think it is a fairly quick process.