HP DL380 Drive Replacement Wrong Procedure followed

[ozmank]

Hi All,

One of our customer had bad HDD on HP DL380. We inform them to replace this HDD with new one. The person unfortunately turned off the server and replaced both HDD with new HDD and after starting the server, disk was not recognized. We inform them to put back the old HDD and after starting server, forcefully we need to choose option to repair with loss of data with pressing F2 key. After that the OS failed to boot. 

Any suggestion how to fix this ? 

[waaronb]

It sounds like the damage may be done. In a case like that, if someone had accidentally removed both, I would have tried installing just the one working drive from before.

The failed drive, when it's inserted back in, might actually work okay for a little bit, and now the system could decide it has the most up to date and use that one to restore a mirror, instead of the other way around. But that failed drive has probably been dead for a while and is out of date.

Anyway, once that F2 was hit to repair, that was that... I don't know why the OS wouldn't boot, but something must be out of sync... whatever failed on the old drive might have caused some drive corruption on that one that got replicated to the other.

Your best bet now is to do a Windows repair (or whatever OS, use it's recovery methods).

If the programs can all be reinstalled and you just want the data, you could install a new copy of windows rather than doing a repair. If you're afraid of doing more damage, pull those old drives out temporarily and use the new drives to create a new array and install Windows there.

Once Windows is up and running, pop those old drives back in (just the good one would be fine... it'll operate in recovery mode). Do a chkdsk or just see if the data itself can be recovered okay.

If you happen to have another HP server running, installing that drive into the other server would be much easier... pop it in, grab the data, and then rebuild that old server once the data is safe and sound.

Above all, don't panic. :) Do whatever you can to protect the data on those drives and keep from making things worse.

[ozmank]

Great thanks for suggestions. We will discuss and try the proposed solution. 

[PGTRI]

hi,

i'm not sure about the controller you're using, but if it's a smart array one, you can try to boot into ACU and to reenable the logical drive.

regards,