Smart array RIS table / partition recovery

[David C Chang]

We had a DL360 G3 server (with a 5i controller) die. The OS was installed on a RAID 1 (mirrored) logical drive. I took one of the drives and installed it into a DL380 G3 that we weren't using (it has a 641 controller). The DL380 gave a lot of messages about the drive being in degraded mode, but booted the OS. We used that OS for 3 days. I then wanted to re-do the mirror by backing up the OS, re-creating a new RAID 1 volume on the DL380 and restoring it. After I performed the backup, I removed all the drives from the DL380 and put in 2 new drives and created a RAID 1 logical drive. However, when I went to restore the backup, I found out that the backup was bad. So, I again removed the 2 new drives and put back the original single disk to perform another backup. This is where things went south.

When I booted the single drive this time, there were a lot of messages about missing drives (I thought they were the same as before, but they were not). It said something about only seeing 1 logical drive and sat there for about 20 seconds and then took the default action (F7) which was to build a new RAID 0 drive. Once that happened, my original disk would not boot. I assume it overwrote the RIS table with new information and marked the drive as being new (no valid data). How do I get my boot disk back? Can I simply re-partition it using fdisk? Or, do I need more advanced methods?

I'm really stuck now because I don't have a good backup nor a bootable OS disk.

DC