[jonin]

hello all,

i have a dell poweredge server that crashed.
it had 2 x 250GB in a RAID configuration...1 i think..mirrored.

anyway i unplugged the drives and the first one doesnt read at all...the second im running a chkdsk and its just coming up a lot with file segment 23xx is unreadable...

are both drives just fried? or is there a specific way to read RAID drives? dont know to much about RAID

any help greatly appreciated

 

[Wand3r3r]

"anyway i unplugged the drives"

So you removed them from the raid controler and have them on a different machine?

Remember how big the server volume was? Was it 250 or 500gig?

 

[jonin]

yes i unplugged them to another working machine...they are sata drives...
it was 250GB

thanks for the answer wanderer

 

[djaburg]

If the drives were mirrored, viewing the data "shoudn't" be an issue, if it was RAID0 (striped) then you're out of luck. It they were from a RAID5 array, you're also out of luck.

 

[Wand3r3r]

If you put the drives back on the original controller they were formatted under and you see the same as now then yes the drives are toast.

 

[Troy_Jollimore]

Sounds like it was a RAID0... It was, if you answer Wanderer's question with, "~460GB". Normal behavior for a RAID1 crashing is that you'll get a failure message about the single drive, and the server will run normally. Both drives COULD have crashed (it may have been the controller, but you said you're trying on a different machine) but that's more unlikely.

I had something like that happen last summer when my two 36GB Raptor system drives (RAID1) went down. Some sort of controller glitch, but the system refused to boot. We ended up taking one of the drives and plugging it into the other on-board controller of the server and running an in-place install of Windows. That got things up and running again, albeit more slowly. But it was all done within a few hours, which was the whole purpose of having a RAID1 array in the first place.