DL380 G5 Disk Issue

[jamesbrewer6]

Hi, first post and I hope I got the correct place. I've inherited two servers that share 12 disks between them (both dl380 g5's).  Lets call them server A and serverB.  ServerA has four disks in it and serverB has 8.  The drives had been extracted and mixed up. I have no idea what disk goes in which server.   I need to get these arrays back up a working.  I've tried the simple things like looking at the hard drive model numbers but both were bought at the same time and all drives are identical.  I've downloaded the SmartCD and can boot into the ACU and generated a controller (P400) report thinking I might be able to find some helpful information here but haven't. I was hoping someone might be able to help me indentify what disk is part of which servers raid array.

Any help/guidance will be greatly appreciated.

Regards.

James

[Renjiv]

Greetings!

James,

Have you installed PSP. then go toArray Configuration Utility and take logical and physical screenshots. ACU is under start-programs-hp system tools.

More information is available on the use guide:

http://www.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00709035.pdf

I hope you find this information helpful.

Regards,

Renji V

[jamesbrewer6]

Hi Renjiv, thanks for the assistance.  Both servers were ESXi VM servers so I can't boot into Windows.  I have downloaded the SmartStart CD and I can boot into that and then start the ACU from there.  I can see the controller and query the disks, but it is seeing nothing of the old configuration and all disks are listed as "un-assigned".  I've run a controller report but there is so much information I'm not sure what I should be looking for.  Is there likely to be something in the disk information section of the report that would indicate if it was part of serverA's raid array or serverB's?

Many thanks

James

[Suman_1978]

Hi,

Its not possible for the server or ACU to identify which disks were part of the server/raid.

Customer should mark the drive some how to identify its server and bay number.

In your scenario, its better to create a new RAID/configuration.

Thank You!
I am a HP employee
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[waaronb]

If you can't just redo the configuration and restore any data, you're going to have a hard time of things.

If I found myself in this situation, where someone for some reason scrambled all the disks together, the only thing I could think to do is install one disk in one server, and boot it up.

It would read some info off that first disk and let me know a couple of things... first, it'll let me know what other disks are missing.  That tells me if this disk was one of the group of 4, or group of 8.  Second, you may have some info about if that disk is in the right slot or not... this will at least let you know which two of the 12 drives are drive #1 for their group.

Do that for each of the 12 disks... group them together and label them.

Then you can plug the group of 4 disks into one server.  You will almost definitely NOT get them in the same order as before, and when you boot up it'll tell you the drives have been moved.  I forget if it lets you continue on and it just makes a note that the bays and drives are moved, or if you have to then take the disks out and move them to the right spot.  Either way it should be easy at this point to continue.

This all depends on an assumption that there was just one array spanning all of the disks from each server.  If that's not the case, like if the server with 8 drives was setup with 2 groups of 4 disks each in a RAID 5 or something, then you're really going to be doing some more detective work to sort things out.

If you have zero idea of how the arrays were configured or anything else, well, you're on your own.  How valuable is the data on there?  You might be able to dig up info on how HP stores the info on each disk, mount them in another system and from a low-level, read that info, and then figure it out.  Or send it to a data recovery firm which would basically do something similar (you have to tell them the whole story so they know how to piece it back together).

Anyway, since you got these servers used, I guess, then you probably don't care about any old data on them?  Just put the drives wherever you want and delete any old array info it happens to find, and start fresh.

Good luck!

[Dennis Handly]

>If you can't just redo the configuration and restore any data, you're going to have a hard time of things.

If this was a HP 3PAR, all disks are tracked by their WWN (or serial number), which is on their label.

And if you didn't have a "showpd -i" report handy and you had the SP sending back reports to HP, they would be there or on the SP.