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So I have a Penguin Relion 1900 1U rack mounted server running CentOS 7 that recently had a hard disk failure. It had 4 hard drives configured in RAID 6. To replace the failed HDD, I powered off the machine, swapped the failed one with a new drive of the same size (4TB) and powered on the machine again.

The system booted into the EFI shell instead of loading the OS. I exited from the shell and went to BIOS and noticed the status of the RAID array was rebuilding under the RAID menu in advanced setting of the BIOS.

6-7 hours later, I noticed the rebuild had completed and that the RAID status was in 'Optimal' condition with everything looking good. I saved and quit out of the BIOS, but it went into the EFI shell instead of loading the OS again.

I rebooted the machine and under the BIOS boot sequence priority list could not see the virtual drive provided by the RAID. But instead there was a "SCSI Hard Drive, ..." option.

My booting is set to UEFI mode, so I switched to Legacy under the CSM configuration settings in BIOS and when I reboot, it goes into network booting and the "SCSI Hard Drive ..." disappears from the boot order sequence list.

When in Legacy boot, I do get the option to load into the RAID BIOS, which I did to take a look. All status shows optimal and I can see the Virtual Drive created and present in the RAID BIOS. It's just not being picked up by the system BIOS and loading the OS.

I have attached pictures of my BIOS settings.

RAID setting in the System BIOS (only appears when UEFI booting, also notice boot device set to [None])

map -r output on UEFI shell

Boot order in BIOS

CSM config

Any help would be much appreciated. Already spent a whole day try to fix it!

UPDATE

So I tried booting off a CentOS USB and saw that the RAID volume is visible, but not mounted and not set as the boot drive. I cannot seem to mount it either and getting errors as seen in pics below.

fdisk -l

lsblk

Watchdogs1499
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  • restore from backup. No backups? Question is offtopic then – djdomi Feb 09 '23 at 19:31
  • @djdomi We do have a backup, but it is a month old. We'd prefer trying to restore our current configuration. As far as I can say, all our data is intact in the volume. It's just that the OS cannot see it or boot into it, and that's what I'm trying to figure out. – Watchdogs1499 Feb 10 '23 at 17:04

1 Answers1

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UPDATE:

So after talking to manufacturer support and sending them the logs, they concluded that the boot loader got corrupted somehow or was overwritten. This does not normally happen and a simple swap of hard drives should not cause this problem, so it was a one off scenario.

HOW I FIXED IT:

I did have a backup of all the data. Bought fresh hard drives, rebuilt the array, reinstalled the OS and restored from backup.

Watchdogs1499
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