Question : I need help recovering from RAID 5 disk failure

Hi all,

Please be gentle with me as this is not my strong point!

I have been tasked with (circumstances to long to explain) investigating the situation surrounding a Dell Power Edge 2900 server that will not boot.

It throws up the error of "no bootable device found". On entering the DELL bios RAID utility it seems that one of the disks has failed and that it needs to be replaced and the array rebuilt.

So far this was all seeming fairly straightforward and I was going to trot off and buy a new disk the same sze etc and proceed with rebuilding the Array.

However it seems that two disks may have failed! I say this because on the VPD (I think that is what it is called) I get the following (or similar doing this from memory)

Disk ID 0: Missing
Disk ID 1: ok
Disk ID 2: ok
Disk ID 3: ok
Disk ID 4: Missing (flashing orange power light as failed disk)

In the physical disk manager it shows the same as above but that the Disk with ID0 is 'Foreign'

What I want to know is do I have to force disk 0 to go online and rebuild the array? (or will I mess things up further?)
Or do I need to buy a new disk and pray that it all comes good and rebuilds the array then?

Sorry to be a bit vague I am somewhat out of my depth!

Thanks

Rob

Answer : I need help recovering from RAID 5 disk failure

Take a look at the following links...

Create GPO to point to a new directory for your mapped drives...
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverDS/thread/7db4b7a7-bacf-45f7-9902-0f90bc48aa4f

File Migration Tool Kit
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=d00e3eae-930a-42b0-b595-66f462f5d87b&displaylang=en

Hope this helps~!