No legal this time or damaged disks. Just a guy that just got served a big dose of bad luck.
Spent time with SuperMicro support and we're pretty sure the board is dead. His suggestion was try to find another motherboard on eBay or such. But no guarantee that everything else is still functioning. SuperMicro uses the Intel RAID software on their motherboards. Hooked up drives to another server one at a time. The 80GB drive came up as the Windows system drive. Just the operating system. Good guess on my part. Tried 2 of the 3 250GB drives and after the little pop-up window about installing device driver software Windows displays a window 'I don't recognize this drive. You need to initialize the drive before it can be used.' OK, so windows can't identify the drive without initializing it. Probably not a straight Windows drive. I skip the third drive. Unplug the drives from my server and reboot. Enter the BIOS and enable the Intel RAID on the motherboard. Hook the 4 drives back up and power on the server. At the RAID prompt enter the keys to get to the internal RAID software. RAID software sees all 4 drives individually but not as a virtual disk of any kind. Hmmm.. Placed calls to a couple of local places advertising data recovery services. No one answers, please leave a message. Leave message but no call back. Called guy and gave him the still so far bad news that it looks like he will be spending a lot of money. Thanks Ben for the help. Art -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 3:23 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: recovering dead server hard drives On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 6:00 PM, Art DeKneef <[email protected]> wrote: > I can put the drives into another > system but if I remember correctly software RAID writes to the hard > drive and the Windows software doesn't recognize them. Windows tends to want to write some kind of "signature" to disks, but that's only if they don't have one already. In a legal/forensic situation, you don't want to risk that or anything else; that doesn't apply here. In a data recovery situation it can in theory be bad, but the chances of anything bad actually happening are relatively low. That said, since the guy has no backup at all, you may want to make a block-level disk image of each hard drive before you try anything with Windows. That way, if something weird happens, you've got a way back. If the disks are physically damaged, even powering them on can make things worse, although that is again relatively rare. If you're really worried, mail the disks off to a data recovery house (I like CBL -- free quotes! http://www.cbldatarecovery.com/) and pay several thousand dollars. This is prolly overkill, but it also has the least likelihood of data loss. The owner gambled and lost; that tends to be expensive. If it's the usual sort of SOHO -- i.e., no money -- attach the disks as secondary drives in a working Windows box and see what happens. If it really is Windows software RAID, they should come up as new drives. If it's actually a motherboard-based RAID controller, well.... you have to find a compatible RAID implementation. If it's an Intel chipset, that might not be too bad. If it's some random Taiwanese product of which they only ever made 50 of them and this guy has one of them, well... see above about thousands of dollars. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
