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This may be a duplicate but I think the situation is different.

We were having problems with a HP MSA2000 SAN, speaking to support they suggested that we upgraded the firmware to the latest version and clear out one of the VDISKS which had a problem.

Patched the firmware and then 3 days later removed the VDISK, however there was a bug in the firmware which meant the meta data for the disks was being written across multiple VDISKS, this meant when I removed the failing VDISK, it deleted 2 healthy ones.

I thought this would not be a problem, but it looks like 2 of my VM's hosted on the healthy VDISKS did not have backups of one specific file and the VM level backups had become corrupted.

My question is, is it possible to rebuild the array that these disks where on, as the data should all still be there.

There where 8 disks setup in RAID 10. I have been looking at data recovery companies and this seems to be an option but I feel as the data should still be held on the disks as they have not been over written. Is there a way I can get this data back ASAP? Again, one issue I am facing is that other than a SAN unit, I do not have space to put 8 disks and a boot disk into a server so any suggestions would be great.

And yes, I know the backup policy needs to include testing the backups have worked correctly.

boburob
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I'm curious about the initial P2000 problem that prompted this. Which P2000 model/generation/interconnect do you have?

I'd probably accept this as a loss...

While the data may still be on disk, you need to reconstruct the array. A good data recovery firm should be able to reassemble this and may have access to the necessary hardware resources.

With the P2000, like Smart Arrays, the RAID data is on disk. But you've cleared the RAID configuration. So I'm not sure what other options you have.

ewwhite
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  • Yeah, getting quite alot of pressure about the 1 file that we have lost, so probably going to have to pay out for recovery. The original issue was random cut outs of storage and hanging VM's where the VM's lost connection to the SAN. The new firmware actually did help here as it identified 3 failed disks which had not been spotted by the previous firmware. – boburob Jun 17 '13 at 13:01
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    @boburob I'm researching this for you. – ewwhite Jun 17 '13 at 13:03
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    Ok, I have just decided to bite the bullet and its sent to a recovery company. Managed to convince management that cheapest != best with this. – boburob Jun 19 '13 at 09:24