Help on RAID ...

[Michael Hipp]

Ben Duncan wrote:
> What i am being told is "No OS FOUND" ...
> 
> makes me wonder if they have the disk order screwed up ..
> 
> Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> <SNIP>
>>
>> "will not boot" means what exactly?
>>
>>> Any idea on the INTEL RAID config on how to get it to rebuild ?
>>
>> Normally you enter the RAID BIOS to do this sort of thing, although
>> Intel's RAID should have Linux support as well, which should provide a
>> mechanism for doing this from within the OS automatically (assuming
>> that you could boot the OS).

I think your first task is to get them to 'fess up as to exactly what they did 
and in what order.

Second task is to lay hands on the most recent full backup and don't let it 
out of your sight.

(Third task is to beat them senseless for not calling you *first* before they 
did anything.) :-)

And a few questions...
- Do they know, for sure, which disk is the bad one and which are the good ones?

- Did they do anything in the RAID BIOS (or OS RAID admin tool) - especially 
anything about removing members or initializing volume or somesuch? Some of 
these things have really bad UIs and very confusing terminology and options. 
It would be really easy to totally bork something. Proceed carefully.

- Is this for certain a hardware RAID and not a software RAID?

If it is a disk ordering problem, inserting one disk at a time, boot on to the 
  RAID BIOS and see if the member is listed as present might allow you to get 
each disk in the right spot with no more than 3 tries.

Depending on the magnitude of the crisis, you may want to think about talking 
to one of those data recovery services that specialize in getting the data off 
of RAID volumes.

Just some random thoughts...

Michael