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First of all forgive me that my understanding of Dell RAID system is limited. I have a dell PowerEdge server with PREC H330 Mini controller with 6 of the 8 slot having a physical drive (each 2.182TB) setup as RAID 5 (showing around 10TB with degraded status). Initially the server failed to boot with an error message that it can't find bootable device with the 7th disk slot blinking orange. To make the problem much worse, in an attempt to clear dust, I removed the drive from 7th slot and mistakenly put in back on 1st slot which was empty. Upon realizing this I then removed it and put it back on slot 7. Now at the physical disk management section of the controller it shows disk 1 is rebuilding at 0% and disk 7 says foreign. All the rest 5 are online. There is an import or clear foreign configuration for drive 7 but not sure what this will do. Is there any way to recover from these?

Biruk Abebe
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  • Unfortunately, it is very hard to understand what exactly you did. If you can run Linux from USB and run `megacli` utility there, you may get extract the complete status of the RAID array and attach it into the question, so we'll be better able to find out how to help you. Try starting with [slax@Debian](https://www.slax.org/download/slax-64bit-11.4.0.iso) followed by adding into live system the [HWraid repo](http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages), then apt install megacli and report when you succeeded. – Nikita Kipriyanov Dec 27 '22 at 14:04
  • @NikitaKipriyanov Thank you. But upon close inspection I believe I have unfortunately a 2 drive failure. The RAID was actually build with 7 drivers and current only 5 are online while slot 1 is in rebuild state and slot 7 is in a foreign state. I will try to boot from USB and report the output as suggested. – Biruk Abebe Dec 27 '22 at 14:07
  • I think it's time to lend this job to the professional data rescue service. – Nikita Kipriyanov Dec 27 '22 at 15:08

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when you have a two disks failure in a RAID 5 it is possible to recover the RAID, it is important to know the order in which the drives failed, if the last drive failed it is not physically damaged you just need to put it online, the VD will be on degraded state but you will have access to the data.

Regards,

Coré #iwork4dell

Coré
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  • It would be nice if you also describe exact steps how to do that safely (without the risk of losing the data which is currently recoverable). – Nikita Kipriyanov Dec 28 '22 at 06:08
  • @Coré Thanks. Well actually as I wrote in my last comment drive in slot 1 was in rebuild state (i don't understand why) and it finished rebuilding and now the status of the RAID changed from degraded to ready while drive 7 is still in foreign state. The logs show drive 7 pending failure (with a log entry saying Predictive failure reported for Disk 7) which is now foreign state and importing the foreign configuration failed with error "configuration is not complete". I believe drive 1 was the last to fail. The server is still not booting however with "no bootable media" error. – Biruk Abebe Dec 28 '22 at 06:24
  • @Coré As it turns out the boot error was not related to the RAID at all. Upon inspection of the logs, there was a CMOS battery failure resulting in the loss of the BIOS configuration and the boot type was reset to legacy where it should have been UEFI. Setting it back booted the server. – Biruk Abebe Dec 28 '22 at 14:22