Help on RAID ...

[Yu Meng Chong]

Hi Ben,

> Someone brought in a Intel Server board with a RAID 5 array.
> It has 3 disk and one of the hard disk went out.
> It is Serial ATA.
> 
> They decided to yank all the hard drives, then put them all back in.
> Now it will not boot.
> 
> Any idea on the INTEL RAID config on how to get it to rebuild ?


If it was a IBM server, I'd be able to say that you just have to locate the Server Manager CD and boot off it. It will load a Linux OS that is on the CD, then launch a graphical application for checking and building RAID arrays. You can verify that the RAID array is still configured correctly in the GUI. 

You could try to see if Intel ships a similar CD with the motherboard. 

My suspicion is that 2 or more hard disks were yanked out at the same time. If they did that, then I believe the data is gone. You can still rebuild the RAID array, but you would have to reload the OS, restore from backup, etc. 

That's why I prefer using disk cloning software for backups. Fast restores and re-builds compared to tape. 

Regards,
pascal chong