charm_quark Posted December 30, 2010 Share Posted December 30, 2010 hi guys, well i'm stuck in a very awkward position a pickle more likely , promised i would help somebody and he ended being an ass. i have a server running "ms server 2003", configured to raid 5 ( i think), it is using a raid controller card (so it is hardware raid), has three hard-drives, the problem is that first disk (disk 0) has an error a bad sector. so when it boots its crashes, so it means i have to swap, the drive's the task is to return the machine like "nothing ever happened", so should i just plug in a new drive, same size of-course and ask it to rebuild raid... helpppppp or just point me in the write direction .i dont want to loose the data on it! :( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted December 30, 2010 Share Posted December 30, 2010 Assuming they have backups ogf the data, yes, plug the new drive in and rebuild. If they don't keep backups, tell them to start taking backups, use another OS to backup all the data then rebuild the RAID. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infiltrator Posted December 30, 2010 Share Posted December 30, 2010 Just turn off the server, unplug the faulty hard drive plug in the replacement and power it back up. And then go to the Raid controller control panel and rebuild the array. Should be an easy task and tell your friend how important backup really is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted December 31, 2010 Author Share Posted December 31, 2010 (edited) Assuming they have backups ogf the data, yes, plug the new drive in and rebuild. If they don't keep backups, tell them to start taking backups, use another OS to backup all the data then rebuild the RAID. the funny thing is they do have a back up server, F**k the anonymity thing, i have my local "water utilities" server (dum idiots) , and mysteriously, their back up server died, so all hope depends on the server i have.... so now they dont have a backup! i dd the faulty drive, skipping errors , and intend to dd the other drive's as well, just incase things turn south (dd, works on raid right?) Just turn off the server, unplug the faulty hard drive plug in the replacement and power it back up. And then go to the Raid controller control panel and rebuild the array. Should be an easy task and tell your friend how important backup really is. that guy quit the job,and that is why he is an ass. the reason i'm very suspecious, is because when i plugged in the "disk 0" on to my ubuntu machine to dd it had a 31GB. NTFS partition and the rest was raid, so that is where i start wondering did they configure the raid correctly!, i did plug in a new drive, and rebuilt the raid, but the thing wont boot! Edited December 31, 2010 by charm_quark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Cooper Posted December 31, 2010 Share Posted December 31, 2010 Go into your RAID controllers interface (usually you are prompted in the machines boot up to press a key combo to access the RAID menu). In there check how they have configured the RAID. It looks like they have set up part of one drive so that it isn't in RAID and put an NTFS partition on it. Now that you have replaced the drive and rebuilt the array any data on the RAID5 array should be fine, the problem here is it looks like the main OS wasn't on the RAID array. You could try booting your install media and asking it to repair your OS. Hopefully the bad sectors haven't lost any important data from the partition. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infiltrator Posted December 31, 2010 Share Posted December 31, 2010 the reason i'm very suspecious, is because when i plugged in the "disk 0" on to my ubuntu machine to dd it had a 31GB. NTFS partition and the rest was raid, so that is where i start wondering did they configure the raid correctly!, i did plug in a new drive, and rebuilt the raid, but the thing wont boot! What raid are you trying to boot the system on? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted December 31, 2010 Author Share Posted December 31, 2010 (edited) well i'm not booting it on any raid, just my normal machine, Edited December 31, 2010 by charm_quark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infiltrator Posted December 31, 2010 Share Posted December 31, 2010 well i'm not booting it on any raid, just my normal machine, Are you able to use this hard drive on another machine? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted December 31, 2010 Author Share Posted December 31, 2010 no i cant use the drive on another machine, because it is partitioned, as 31Gb of ntfs and 110 GB of raid, the dd, of the drive is fine, but the os is damaged a little bit, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted December 31, 2010 Author Share Posted December 31, 2010 i can mount the 31 gb, and not the rest of the drive! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted December 31, 2010 Share Posted December 31, 2010 Don'ts: Try and mount a FS from a drive that is part of a RAID while it is not in the RAID Do: Image the drives* *This is good for backing up the data, but, recovering this data could be a bit tricky. In my (sort of) short experience with RAID controller, they tend to store the RAID configuration at the end of each drive. This becomes a problem if you take an image of the drives, then put the images onto disks larger that the previous ones, the RAID controller won't find the configuration at the need of the drive and will assume it's a new drive. Of course this is may be different for your RAID controller, but the couple I have used all did it this way. If you know what's up and how do you can probably move the configuration to the end of the drive, but the configuration may have information about the drive size and what not, so that then may become a problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted December 31, 2010 Author Share Posted December 31, 2010 thanks, i did image the three drives, so i guess even if i mess up i can go back, the raid controller is the Adaptec 2610SA, that came with an HP ML 350, and i'm trying to find a manual for it hoping that would help me a bit!, how would i fix the os, because it boots, and windows starts loading (you know in 2003 the moving thing), then i get a BSOD, and it automatically restarts, and i dont even have time to read what it says Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted December 31, 2010 Share Posted December 31, 2010 If replacing the drive (and thus removing the bad sectors on the drive) and rebuilding the RAID dose not resolve the BSOD problem, you'll probably have to reinstall :/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted December 31, 2010 Author Share Posted December 31, 2010 (edited) no. no, i didnt want that :(,,,,, forgive me if that i a bit melo dramatic,, if that is the case then i i'll go to my alternative idea, of installing the OS, on a vm, then comparing the and pasting.. hope that will work, but i do think that the guys that did install the RAID, did not do it properly! Edited December 31, 2010 by charm_quark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Cooper Posted December 31, 2010 Share Posted December 31, 2010 You have tried booting the OS in safe/recovery mode? As it sounds like the OS will start booting but crashes before you get the stage where you can login. If you safe mode works then look in your setup to see if it is set to auto reboot on blue screens of death. You don't want that in this case as you want to know what the problem is if you are going to fix it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted January 1, 2011 Author Share Posted January 1, 2011 good point, i had completely forgotten about that, thanks ;) i'm having a bad morning, i was suspicious of my third image it being only 10GB ... ( the images were not made by me) and now it seems that disk 0, and disk 2 are both have bad sectors,. so now i should just jump off a building or something!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Cooper Posted January 1, 2011 Share Posted January 1, 2011 First thing to do is to make fresh images of all the disks (Still keep the old images as well). After you have made the new images I would say that you want to try and boot into safe mode on the OS and take a backup of all the files on the drives on the RAID. As long as the two disks don't have bad sectors in the same set of RAID blocks the controller should be able to recreate any damaged blocks. Afterwards you will have a lot of backups (disk images and files). Then I would suggest getting some new drives to replace the all the drives (not just the two damaged ones). Then you can set up the RAID as you want it to be set up and restore from the backups you have taken. Remember it isn't your fault that they didn't keep backups. Unless you were responsible for their backups or told them they didn't need them. (To others reading this always remember RAID doesn't mean you can stop taking backups.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infiltrator Posted January 3, 2011 Share Posted January 3, 2011 First thing to do is to make fresh images of all the disks (Still keep the old images as well). After you have made the new images I would say that you want to try and boot into safe mode on the OS and take a backup of all the files on the drives on the RAID. As long as the two disks don't have bad sectors in the same set of RAID blocks the controller should be able to recreate any damaged blocks. Afterwards you will have a lot of backups (disk images and files). Then I would suggest getting some new drives to replace the all the drives (not just the two damaged ones). Then you can set up the RAID as you want it to be set up and restore from the backups you have taken. Remember it isn't your fault that they didn't keep backups. Unless you were responsible for their backups or told them they didn't need them. (To others reading this always remember RAID doesn't mean you can stop taking backups.) I very much agree, nothing is safer than having a full backup of your data. Hard drives are inexpensive but they do fail eventually. Keeping a full backup of all the data is very important, however just out of curiosity what do you guys use for backing up your data? Do you guys use any backup tape drive at all? Or just DVDs? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted January 3, 2011 Author Share Posted January 3, 2011 First thing to do is to make fresh images of all the disks (Still keep the old images as well). After you have made the new images I would say that you want to try and boot into safe mode on the OS and take a backup of all the files on the drives on the RAID. As long as the two disks don't have bad sectors in the same set of RAID blocks the controller should be able to recreate any damaged blocks. Afterwards you will have a lot of backups (disk images and files). Then I would suggest getting some new drives to replace the all the drives (not just the two damaged ones). Then you can set up the RAID as you want it to be set up and restore from the backups you have taken. Remember it isn't your fault that they didn't keep backups. Unless you were responsible for their backups or told them they didn't need them. (To others reading this always remember RAID doesn't mean you can stop taking backups.) i did try pressing F8 when booting, disabled auto restart on error, and saw that during normal boot the error (BSOD) is 0x0000007B . however when i go to safe mode, i don't see a bsod, it loads the drivers the last one it loads is acpitabl.dat, and immediately it is supposed to load the gui it reboots, without any errors this time, and no i'm not responsible if they did not keep their backup's :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted January 3, 2011 Author Share Posted January 3, 2011 Vaughon said: 2010.03.31 02:32Ok just thought I would tell you guys what happened, we took the raid out stuffed it into another computer, and still got the same problem, after 2 days search finally found the drivers for the disc tried to make a boot disc with nlite with the drivers but didint work eventually found a usb external floppy drive, yea floppy drive a: then booted pressed “R” to load the drivers and it worked :) we then booted into the win 2k3 cd and ran the second repair from the cd and whooooooohooooooooooooooo it booted……….. Acpitabl.bat was a bitch to fix :) source but now i don't know where to find adaptec 2610SA drivers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted January 3, 2011 Share Posted January 3, 2011 Since you can get in to safe mode, have you tried running a filesystem check? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted January 3, 2011 Author Share Posted January 3, 2011 my bad, it does not successfully get into safe mode, when i pick the safe mode option, it starts to boot, but restarts when loading acpitabl.dat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted January 3, 2011 Share Posted January 3, 2011 my bad, it does not successfully get into safe mode, when i pick the safe mode option, it starts to boot, but restarts when loading acpitabl.dat Nope, it's my fault, I read your post but magically managed to blank out all the negatives. Any way, stick in a Windows install disk, doesn't really matter which one (Vista, 2k3, 7, etc.) and run a file system check from the recovery console. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charm_quark Posted January 3, 2011 Author Share Posted January 3, 2011 (edited) I did try that and it tells me that it cannot find any harddrives in the machine, so it does not even get to the Recovery console Edited January 3, 2011 by charm_quark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted January 3, 2011 Share Posted January 3, 2011 That is where the drivers fro the RAID controller are necessary. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.