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Duardon's questions

Martin Hope
Duardon
Asked: 2011-06-07 06:06:48 +0800 CST
  • 1

I initiated a reboot to perform a disk check, and during the check I lost power to the machine. Now it doesn't boot.

I ran disk utilities on the HDD and everything checks out, but windows won't boot.

The drive has 2 paritions (one is a manufacturer repair drive), and the repair parition is perfectly fine (accessible, etc.), but the OS parition seems to be shot.

I pulled the drive, and plugged it into another machine, which recognizes it, assignes it a drive letter, but I can't access any files on the drive or get any information about it (size, gb used/free, etc.)

I tried doing a windows repair, but it doesn't detect any installations of windows and simply wants to install over the parition via a reformat.

I realize I'm probably up a creek without a paddle on the partition, but I thought I'd reach out and see if anyone had a way to recover data from the drive before I call it a loss and reformat...

Are there any tools available to me to recover data?

Also, why would power loss during a disk check cause the parition to blow out? I've never seen this happen before; in the past I've been able to run a windows repair and recover the installation.

Thanks for any help.

partition windows-xp boot
Martin Hope
Duardon
Asked: 2011-03-29 13:33:07 +0800 CST
  • 0

Server crashed one night. I rebooted, now it hangs just after the SATA RAID Controller successfully POSTs.

This unit has a RAID 5 array, but I haven't pulled a recent enough backup of the data on it to feel comfortable, so I simply can't break the array in any way.

Questions: -First off, what are my options for troubleshooting this without affecting my array?

-Second, can I replace the RAID card without losing my array informatoin?

-Third, how do I back up or transport the array to another machine / card without data loss if I need to?

Thanks for any help you can provide

EDIT:

I finally got past the hang by disabling the Boot BIOS (telling the card not to act as a boot device) and for the first time I was able to get into the RAID utility (Ctrl + A) to see the status of my array. DEGRADED. So now I'm trying to identify which drive failed in the 3 drive array.

Essentially the Boot BIOS being enabled was preventing me from accessing the RAID config BIOS while the drives were connected. I had to disconnect the drives, disable the boot BIOS, reconnect the drives, then I was finally able to get into the config BIOS to see that I had a dregraded array.

QUESTIONS:

  1. How do I identify which drive failed? The array status screen doesn't seem to indicate which drive is causing the degradation. I'm verifying each drive with the BIOS utility right now, but I'm wondering if there's an easier way that doesn't take hours and hours.
  2. I have the option to rebuild a failed array with the (Ctrl + R) Rebuild tool in the BIOS. Is this an option for a DEGRADED array as opposed to a FAILED array, as the tool was designed for? What are the risks?
  3. Why didn't my array boot with a single drive failure? RAID 5 should have kicked in and allowed the system to recover and boot on 2 drives.
  4. If it had multiple drive failures, then why is the array DEGRADED instead of FAILED?
raid boot sata