Missing Logical Volumes in a A5856A card - HP Disk System 2100 environment

[Lars Olsson]

The configuration for Logical Disks is missing from the NVRAM on a RAID 4si card (A5856A), but the Physical Disks work properly. In "irm" I can see the physical disks but no logical disks. I have tried to recreate the configuration using the following method:
1) Disconnect cables to Disk System 2100
2) Clear the configuration from NVRAM (no configuraion existing is reported)
3) Reconnect the SCSI cables
With NO LUCK :-(
There is no documentation on previous configuration (i.e. "irdiag -v" output) so I can't recreate as it was.
Is there ANYONE out there that could help me with how I could recreate the environment without loosing all data.
NEED HELP...

[Thayanidhi]

In irm what is disk status shown?

READY or ONLINE?

It can happen that if you diconect the DS2100 and reboot the system all the disks go offline. Select them and make it online again. Since you already cleared the NVRAM, I doubt whether you get your data!!

Best of luck
TT

[Lars Olsson]

The disks were in READY STATE before and after the clear of NVRAM. They could not be put into ONLINE state. As they could not be made ONLINE and no logical Disks were configured I followed the steps in HP's document "HP A5856A RAID 4Si PCI 4-Channel
Ultra2 SCSI Controller
Installation and Administration Guide" on how to recreate them. No luck.
Any help to get?

[amhakassa]

Hi Lars,

If you have created another array and initialize a logical drive, I am sorry to tell you that you lost anything on the hard drives. However, If you ahve not initialized the drive you can try to reconfigure the array in different ways ( as you don't have the previous config info) until you got the right config

How many drives did you have?
answer the these two question and we can try to reconfigure the array

Regards
Amha Kassa

[Lars Olsson]

Hello, and thanks for the replies. No, I have not created and initialized anything yet. I just tried to recover the configurations as stated on page 173/174 in the manual mentioned in my initial question at the top. This was done after trying to force the logical the status of the disks in the 2100 Disk system from READY to ONLINE state, which failed. The disks remained in READY state, regardless of trying to force-change using "irm".
You also ask how many drives there were, there are 4 Physical disks in the 2100 Disk System, and 1 Logical Disk configured.

[amhakassa]

Hi Lars,

You can reconfigure the array as it was before with out initializing it and see if you can get the data. If you have a backup of your data it is nice because chances are you lost everything.

Answer me this question before we try anything
1. How was the hard drives configured
4HDD in raid 5
3HDD in raid 5 and 1HDD as a hotspare
2HDD in raid 1 and HDD in another raid 1
or how was the configuration. because to reconfigure as it was we have to at least get this info

Regards
Amha Kassa

[Lars Olsson]

Thanks for your help Amhsa. It was in 4HDD - RAID 5 configuration with 1 Logical disk configured. I appreciate the help i'm getting on this.

[Lars Olsson]

Hi again, I should maybe be more precise: The environment was configured as follows:
1 logical Drive:
Logical Drive: 0
Size: 104193 MB (101.8 GB)
StripeSize: 64 KB
Write Policy: WRTHRU
Read Policy: Adaptive
Cache Policy: Cached IO
# of Stripes: 4
State: Optimal
Spanned: NO
#Spans: 1
Disks in span0 (channel/scsi):
0:0
0:2
0:4
0:6

Once again,thanks for all help with this.

[Lars Olsson]

Hello Again Amha, I finally fixed it, so no more help is needed. Thanks a lot for the help and effort you put in. It was really appreciated and helped me to get onto the right track.
Case closed.

[Lars Olsson]

Finally fixed, using reconfiguration without initializing. Thanks everyone :-)