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Seemingly without cause the server suddenly stopped working. On reboot, it says one or more logical drives has failed.

HP Smart Array 5i Menu

Drive #1 is the C drive with the OS and Drive #2 is the data drive. It shows that drive #2 is in INTERIM RECOVERY. Does that mean it'll fix itself or I need to replace a drive? Also, for drive #1, it shows "OK" next to the physical drives. Does that mean if I delete the logical drive and recreate it, I could reinstall the OS?

Logical Drive #1 Logical Drive #2

There's only 5 physical drives installed in 6 bays.

YarGnawh
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2 Answers2

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When you boot, you'll be prompted with an option to either continue with logical drives disabled or to re-enable them. F1 and F2 are the options.

Be sure to re-enable the failed logical drive.

ewwhite
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I guess you are already aware of it, but the setup you are looking at, is badly broken to begin with. How can a server with 5 physical disks be running two RAID5 arrays? You need atleast 6 disks for that. You are missing one disk to begin with.

Does that mean it'll fix itself or I need to replace a drive?

I would assume your second Logical Drive is running in degraded state since a few month as someone already took a broken disk out without replacing it. The "INTERIM RECOVERY" state means a disk is missing/broken, but due to the redundancy provided by the RAID controller, the data is still accessable for now, until a second disk is going to break. If the data on the second Logical Drive is important to you, I would advise you to boot the system with a live CD and copy the data of to a safe location as soon as possible. In the long run, you'll need to add the third disk back to the server, so the array is able to rebuild and return to a healthy state.

Does that mean if I delete the logical drive and recreate it, I could reinstall the OS?

That should be possibly if we assume the drives are really OK as shown in your screenshot. You could also try to start from your HP SmartStart CD and run the Array Diagnostic Utility. The ADU log will show more details then the screenshots you posted. It may be possible, that you are able to simply reenable the Logical Drive in the ADU, for example if the reason for the failed state is a temporary problem with detecting the drives.

s1lv3r
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  • You may not understand how HP logical drives work. You can have multiple logical drives of differing RAID levels on the same group of disks. – ewwhite May 12 '17 at 16:08
  • @ewwhite I don't want to disagree with a 150k rep user, but are you sure this is the case here? After all we are talking about a decade old U320 SCSI controller and looking at the screens in the OP, I would say he had 3x73g + 3x300g disks, when the server was originally set up. – s1lv3r May 12 '17 at 16:19
  • Oh, no here... LD2 is damaged and needs a disk replacement. – ewwhite May 12 '17 at 16:25
  • @ewwhite would it help if i insert a 300gb drive into the 6th bay? – YarGnawh May 12 '17 at 17:36
  • @ewwhite also, i have Window 2013 running on the server. which livecd OS should i use to access LD2? – YarGnawh May 12 '17 at 17:39
  • @YarGnawh You have got two unrelated problems here: **1.** Your LD2 is missing a drive and running in degraded state (a bad think, as it results in degraded performance and if another drive fails *the data will be gone*). **2.** Your LD1 is offline (so you can't boot your OS). – s1lv3r May 12 '17 at 21:10
  • To solve problem **1.** you'll need to add another 300gb drive to the 6th bay, so the RAID can rebuild and finally return to an healthy state. To solve problem **2.** you could do as ewwhite suggested, and try to reenable LD1 at the boot promp, or you could try to check out why it failed by running the ADU. – s1lv3r May 12 '17 at 21:13