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?
It is a test server, so technically no big deal, but you know how it is with "test" servers... It would be pretty annoying to lose all the data.
I've tried booting the 8.30 SmartStart and using the ADU/ACU utility, but it doesn't seem to show anything useful for this. It shows the controller and all drives being "uninitialized", not just being out of order. The Option ROM utility also doesn't show anything.
Suggestions, aside from "use software RAID next time"?
Kevin
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).
Well, we got lucky and it is back in operation. There are 14 drive bays, so an exhaustive search of the permutations would be time-prohibitive. I'll label the drives from now on when I'm doing something like this!
On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 8:34 AM, Trevor Cordes trevor@tecnopolis.ca wrote:
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). _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable
HP has their own command line tools which have a lot more features and options than the BIOS does. I recently used them to turn two single disks into a RAID 1 on a live system with no data loss or downtime.
They also have a lot of querying tools for examining the raid set etc.
If you haven't already tried them I can find out some more information.
Regards
I'd like to know more about those command-line tools! I don't know when I'd need them again (never, I hope), but I'd rather be prepared!
On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 11:02 AM, John Lange john@johnlange.ca wrote:
HP has their own command line tools which have a lot more features and options than the BIOS does. I recently used them to turn two single disks into a RAID 1 on a live system with no data loss or downtime.
They also have a lot of querying tools for examining the raid set etc.
If you haven't already tried them I can find out some more information.
Regards
John Lange http://www.johnlange.ca
On Fri, 2010-06-04 at 11:53 -0500, 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?
It is a test server, so technically no big deal, but you know how it is with "test" servers... It would be pretty annoying to lose all the data.
I've tried booting the 8.30 SmartStart and using the ADU/ACU utility, but it doesn't seem to show anything useful for this. It shows the controller and all drives being "uninitialized", not just being out of order. The Option ROM utility also doesn't show anything.
Suggestions, aside from "use software RAID next time"?
Kevin _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable
Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable
You can start here:
http://people.freebsd.org/~jcagle/hpacucli-readme
There is also official documentation available from the HP website. Due to the insane amount of time it takes to find anything on the official HP web site I'm not able to provide that link at the moment.
If you find your hardware you can go to the download section where the tools are available along with the documentation.
Let me know if you need more help finding the right thing.
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John Lange -
Kevin McGregor -
Trevor Cordes