I'm puzzled...spent several hours researching this behavior and have not come up with anything that makes sense.

OK, we've got a Poweredge 1800 server with a LSI Logic 1020/1030 RIAD card that won't boot up. Upon arriving at the office, a piercing beeping could be heard coming from the server closet.After popping off the front panel, we can see Drive 0 is green, but drive 1,2 and 3 are showing two solid red lights.  As much as I findi it hard to believe that three harddrives failed simultaneously, that would be the logical conclusion, right? After logging into the RAID configuration tool and seeing drive 0 is online and drives 1,2,and 3 have failed that would seem to confirm that.

However, this is the odd thing.

I switch Drive 0 and Drive 1 to see if I the failed drives move and am surprised that all the lights show single green lights and I check the RAID configuration again, and suddenly Drive 0 (the old drive 1) is now online, drive 1 (the old drive 0) has a status of REBUILD, and drives 2 and 3 (which I have not moved) suddenly show as being online.

I reseated the RAID card, the back panel, and all connectors and this condition is absolutely consistent.

In the original order, drive 0 is online and drives, 1,2,and 3 are failed; swap drives 0 and 1 and suddenly drives 0,2 and 3 are online and drive one is showing a status of rebuilt.

A visual inspection of the RAID card and back panel show nothing obvious.

I am tempted to try and rebuild the RAID with the drives out of order, but that seems "ill-advised"

This is a system that is soon to be retired, but their is archival data on it we would like to recover. Unfortunately, there has not been a recent backup.

Any suggestions on how you might proceed if you were in a similar situation?