Any way to recover data from a failed disk?

[Ray Humpage]

Does HP any services where they can attempt to retrieve data from a failed disk?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Generally there are some folks in silicon valley and elsewhere that do recover data from failed disks.

They are more oriented to PC operating systems than to Unix. It can be done but the results are likely to be poor and very expensive.

SEP

[Ray Humpage]

The disk came up as powerfailed. I reseated it and it was able to write long enough to shut down cleanly. Now I can't get it to come online.

Does a powerfailed disk necessarily mean that the disk read/write mechanism failed or can there be other components that failed thus making it recovrable?

[Ray Humpage]

One more thing. The system is powered down but the disk array is on. The green light on the drive is solid but the amber light flickers somewhat randomly. There is no I/O. What is the disk trying to do?

[KUMAR_13]

can u tell me the disk type(INTERNNAL/ or SAN disk array )

Please provide message output (If Possible).

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Power failed can mean many things but basically it means that for whatever reason, the disk never came ready. Disk failures are normal, expected things. That's why you always have mirrors and good backups. If mirrors had been in place, you could have replaced the bad disk "on the fly" and never even had to shutdown --- and the users would never know anything had happened.

In some cases, the disk itself is ok but the electronics are bad. If you have (or can get) an identical drive then it's certainly worth trying to swap the boards.

[Bill Hassell]

There are thousands of reasons that a disk can fail, from any of the electronic components and paths inside the drive to the power components to the controller chip, and of course, the physical disk itself. However, the symptoms seem to indicate electronics rather than a crashed disk. HP does not offer any disk or data recovery services but companies like OnTrack (www.ontrack.com) have been doing this for many years and have detailed information about every drive as well as specialized equipment to bypass failed electronics or to reposition heads to read weak data tracks.

Such services are not cheap but in many cases, the loss of a disk is (without a proper bakcup) is even more costly.

[Ray Humpage]

Thanks for all the info!

This was a test box that I was told could be rebuilt at anytime. Then they starting building in it and didn't inform me. So when the box crashed it was a crisis.

I called some of the places that were on the list and got quotes. VERY expensive.

During the 3 hours it took my manager to decide whether it was cheaper to fix the disk of redo the build we got lucky.
While I was waiting for a response I kept reseating the drive. After about 2.5 hours and 300+ reseats the drive came online for about 30 seconds - long enough for me to copy the critical Oracle file.

Very lucky. And I learned my lesson.

[Ray Humpage]

See my comments above.