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December 4th, 2021 14:00
PERC 6/i failed drives, foreign config and broken array - Please HELP!!
I have an older Dell FS12-TY Server that was ALMOST to be decommissioned (end of year). However before all data could be moved I awoke to errors of inaccessible data. Upon further inspection when rebooting my server, there were issues with the RAID 5 array consisting of 12x 2TB drives. Another guy was working on this at the time and noticed that 2 drives were in a FAILED state. The initial thought was these 2 drives had failed completely and all data is non-recoverable - the other guy didn't attempt to Force Online either of these drives as the error message seemed fairly destructive... Instead, he did remove one of the bad drives, put in a new drive just to see if maybe he could get a rebuild to occur. Nothing happened automatically (which is normal and I think at that point, he removed the drive and replaced the old back in). Now, as he was doing this the drives weren't physically numbered on the box and he had initially pulled the wrong drive. With everything back to normal, now we had a scenario where we had 2 FAILED drives and 1 MISSING drive. This perplexed both of us, but we did notice there was now a foreign config to deal with. Not knowing why that would be there, it was cleared. The other FAILED drive was then reseated, causing another MISSING to be displayed and also config cleared. This was done out of ignorance. but will definitely play into this later.
When i finally was able to physically get in front of the machine, it seems i really wasn't able to do much. Everything appeared online with exception of now 1 Failed Disk and 2 labeled MISSING. I made the same mistake as my coworker with the unlabeled disks and pulled the wrong one, causing ANOTHER disk to show missing. However i DID NOT clear this foreign config. After further inspection, i noticed all drives that were reseated were showing GREEN on their LEDs, while the others were GREEN/RED flashing. I then reseated all drives.
I now have 10 drives showing FOREIGN and 2 showing READY. I cannot seem to import the foreign config, it errors out, saying 8 of my drives failed to import. I now no longer have my VD1 (which was the VD tied to these 12 disks), and worried we really do have a mass data loss scenario here.
Is there ANYWAY to possibly get this data back?? I'm not really sure how to proceed here? I really don't think the drives are physically bad (the ones showing FAILED), because they're both showing online and i have all green lights on the LEDs, but i'm sure that clearing the foreign config is what's screwing me here. Anyway around that??
Here is where i'm currently at:
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DELL-Joey C
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December 6th, 2021 00:00
Hi @RCData,
It's now in a hard situation. Previously if 2 drives were failed, you may need a degraded state VD for the rebuild to be able to initiate. Without 11 disk online, rebuild will not start as there is not sufficient amount of parity to rebuild on RAID5.
It seems from foreign view, there is no configuration to import, so that's the reason you have the error.
From where I can think of is only to retag method, but this is very risky, especially data of 22TB. You mentioned you have reseated all drives, you did not pull out all drives out right? - By that mean, all of the drives are in their actual order correct? This is important to retagging method. If you're not comfortable retagging, I suggest to contact your nearest data recovery center to retrieve the important data.
Here the retag reference: https://dell.to/3rIm9ay. Remember; the clause "After creation do NOT initialize the Virtual Disk. All data should be accessible after a successful RETAG."