P420 Raid 5 lost data

[JSYShaggy]

Hi All,

I have a Gen8 Microserver running Win Server 2016 and have a P420 card installed with Battery and 1Gb Cache module. Attached to it I have the OS running on an SSD and had 3 drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

The 3 drives consisted of 2x 2TB WD Red in bays 1 and 3, and a 1TB Seagate in bay 2 leaving bay 4 free.

I recently bought a 3rd 2TB WD Red and the plan was to add it into the raid 5 array and to expand the array to accomodate the new drive increasing my space to 4TB. I shut down the server, unplugged the 1TB, replaced it with the 2TB and plugged the 1TB into bay 4 thinking I could ;ater use this as extra unprotected storage. Unbeknownst to me I should have left the 1TB disconnected and let the degraded raid pick up the new 2TB but instead it started to create a logical drive in RAID 0 on the new 2TB drive and the original RAID 5 remained in tact.

I let the 2TB raid 0 create and a new logical finisdrive was created along with it. I then deleted the 1 TB drive from the array. All the time the data on the raid 5 array remained in tact and I was able to see it in Windows.So at this point I should have a 1TB raid 0 and a degraded raid 5 with 2 - 2TB drives.

I then deleted the 2 TB logical drive which was created in RAID 0 - as far as I was concerned this logical drive should have nothing to do with the RAID 5 up to this point. All of a sudden the drive containing all my data dissapeared from windows and the RAID started transforming. During the transformation, ACU showed the new 2TB uder the old logical drive found under the raid 5 array so I assumed it was adding the new drive to the existing config.

3 days later the drive has finished transforming but the data is not visible in windows? At no point have I chose to create a new RAID 5 array or created a logical drive under that array so everything should be still there but I only see a 2.4TB logical raw drive in disk management.

My questions are what went wrong? and how can I recover all the data?

Thanks

[Sebasbin]

Hello JSYShaggy ,

Please find the below document for HPE Smart Array Controllers - Drive Procedures and should follow the instruction for expanding the drives and upgrading the drive capacity.
https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na-a00020470en_us

[JSYShaggy]

Hi,

The new drive has already been added but the logical drive is showing as RAW in windows.

Recovery software shows the data is still there but the naming structures are messed up and they are no longer in folders so very disorganised.

As the data is still present I'm assuming the partition is screwed up so how do I recover from this?

[Sebasbin]

Hi JSYShaggy ,

Need deep log analysis for this issue and better to log a support case with HPE and with the operating system vendor for further investigation .