On 2010-06-04 Kevin McGregor wrote:
I've got a HP ProLiant server running OpenFiler, and due to errors on my part, the SCSI drives got rearranged. Now the HP 6400 RAID controller complains that an "unsupported drive rearrangement has been attempted", and the logical volume is missing. Is there any way to recover the correct order of drives in the drive bay?
Very very strange that the physical ordering is important! If Adam hasn't already helped :-) ... here's my 2c:
How many drives are we talking? If it's not large, there should be only so many permutations and if you try every single one, one should just magically work.
Suggestions, aside from "use software RAID next time"?
If the data was super important, you could hook up the drives in a non-raid environment and do so byte-level peeking to try to figure out the data arrangement (what raid level was it?), stripe sizes, etc. That should be possible and from then a simple perl program could extract all the data at the block level in the right order and dump to another huge disk or array. I think I could probably pull it off unless the controller is doing something really wacky. I've done similar things in the past during raid disasters of my own (years ago when I learned (the hard way) the value of RAID6 over RAID5).