topic Re: HP ProLiant DL380 G7 restarted while rebuilding array in HPE ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL)

HP ProLiant DL380 G7 restarted while rebuilding array

BernardoLima — Sat, 23 Aug 2014 21:14:07 GMT

It has four hard drives, one is dead, I suppose that another one is dead too, but is there any way to force the array to rebuild again?

The server has restarted while it was rebuilding an array.

My windows server(2008) that is on it won't boot, it goes directly to system recovery screen.

I have an image backup, would restoring it be my only option?

If I restore, it will get back to regular automatically or will I have to configure something?

Re: HP ProLiant DL380 G7 restarted while rebuilding array

waaronb — Sat, 23 Aug 2014 22:29:13 GMT

What RAID level did you have, and how many drives failed?

Hopefully your system still had enough active drives to recover.

If this is a RAID 5 and you had 2 drives fail, you're out of luck and you'll have to restore from a backup once you've replaced the drives and rebuilt the array.

Re: HP ProLiant DL380 G7 restarted while rebuilding array

BernardoLima — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 01:10:02 GMT

@waaronb, thank you very much for your attention!
So, if it's RAID 5, I can only restore the system image once I buy at least a new one?

What if it's not RAID 5?
I've tried to reboot many times, it's stuck at this screen, and when Windows Server boots, it takes me directly to system restore screen.

Additional info that might help:

https://i.imgur.com/fNA76Ro.jpg

Thank you very much for your help.

Re: HP ProLiant DL380 G7 restarted while rebuilding array

Dennis Handly — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 01:10:41 GMT

>if it's RAID 5, I can only restore the system image once I replace at least one?

If RAID 1 or RAID 5, it should rebuild if there is only one failure.

If more than one failure, you need to replace all the disks before you restore the backup.

>What if it's not RAID 5?

If RAID 6, you can have two disks fail.

Re: HP ProLiant DL380 G7 restarted while rebuilding array

waaronb — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 20:48:49 GMT

Be sure to update your firmware versions while you're working on it. The ILO and array firmwares showing on your screenshot are very old.

ILO 3 is up to version 1.70 and P410i is up to 6.40.

The only way to know for sure how your array is doing is to look at the configuration and see how many drives it said failed. If you had 2 drives fail in a RAID 5 then you can't just replace the drives and have it rebuild.

If you're unfamiliar with RAID levels and how they work, there are a number of good places to read up on that like Wikipedia.

You may have had one drive fail and then the array went into recovery mode, where it ran on the other 3 drives but without any more redundancy. If just one of those 3 drives failed, then you're out of luck. Replace all of the failed drives, rebuild the array and get ready to restore from a backup, possibly reinstalling the OS if the failed array was your boot disk. Sounds like it was.

But do double-check what the array is telling you and find out just what drives are bad before you do anything else. It may be telling you that you had a drive die and it was in recovery mode, and then another drive had just a temporary problem.

If that's the case and you don't have backups of your critical data, you *might* be able to recover some things using a disk recovery tool, if only parts of the array are corrupt.

But this is why everyone should have backups of their data and have a plan to restore. Sysadmin 101 stuff.