Proliant ML150 smart drive failure

[jason91]

Hi, we had a power outage in one of our branches in china and the server can't boot.

Here is the message on the boot screen:

"Smart checked failed" on two of our three RAID drives.. (RAID1 I think)

I don't know if I should try to recover the data out of the first HDD with a data recovery program.. or try to rebuild the array? 

This happened probably because of multiple power outages, the power went out 3 times and the ups got fried during the first power-off.

Can you please share some advice for this case... the backups are from last week but it would be very encouraging if there was something I could do to recover more recent data.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi,

If it was a raid1 it should be possible to get it back/up and running with only one hdd, this might depend on if it's the first or second hdd as you are running the software RAID. I'd check out the user guide for the raid controller, maybe it has some valuable information about what to do in a scenario like this. But first, check if you have raid1 or if you got something else..

[jason91]

thank you very much for your reply, I'm using the HP embedded SATA RAID controller.. any ideas to try and rebuild the raid1 array? or is this not advised?

the server can load into safe mode but I tried to backup the data and I am getting an error in NTBackup.. seems like there are metadata problems? or file integrity problems?

I wish the RAID controller had a baterry to save stuff in cases when power goes down like in my case... :(

[Johan Guldmyr]

How is the array set up if you have 3 drives in a RAID1?

Some hdd smart array controllers have a battery (bbwc).

Fora rebuild I believe you need to assign the disk as a hot spare.

[jason91]

Thank you for the reply, i believe it was a RAID10 array, and the server was using the lowest common drive size (250G) for the array, so it was only showing 500GB usable data in the O/S.

one of the local employees in that office said that there was a message for a "degraded array state" in the past months and they kept pressing "enter" for this warning. So apparently the array was already in degraded state

the pdf of the embedded sata controller is here for your reference:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00771065/c00771065.pdf

Any thoughts would be highly appreciated, thank you!

[jason91]

sorry I didn't mention, there is no bbwc/battery in this controller (its the hp embedded intel ICH9R controller)

[Johan Guldmyr]

Both RAID10 and RAID1 an even amount of drives.

"RAID 10 is a stripe of mirrors." from Wikipedia.

If you had 500GB usable data then the RAID10 needs to have been with the 500GB ones. The 250GB wasn't used at all? Or maybe the OS was only on that one and the data was on the 500GB RAID1? You should still find out exactly what type of RAID setup has been used.

[jason91]

The only info I could get was that the O/S could only see 250GB .. and it turns out it was only two physical drives, not three. they just had three logical drives configured in the O/S..

[Johan Guldmyr]

Maybe scandisk or filesystem check would be a good idea to run on the disk, maybe that would clear up some of the problems on the disk..

[jason91]

Thank you, will try these. If there are any other ideas please let me know

I was thinking of trying spinrite too.