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C240-M4L OS Drives Fell Out Of Raid

itguy1024
Level 1
Level 1

We lost power to this server yesterday. Initially it would only boot to Server recovery. I booted it to safe mode fine but saw that the local disks with the OS have come out of their raid.

 

The server boots normally now but it’s showing a C and E drive instead of just a C drive.

 

Is there a way in the bios to pair the drives again without losing the data? It’s a C240-M4L

 

I was poking around the BIOS but couldn't find anything except the MegaRaid for the local sas storage which isn't where the OS is loaded.

4 Replies 4

Evan Mickel
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Re-initializing or re-building that RAID is going to blow away any data stored there, so there is not a way to simply re-apply a previous RAID config unfortunately.  I personally have never heard of drives falling out of RAID for any reason, certainly not during a power cycle.  A power cycle is the only way to fully reboot the CIMC, and we have over the years needed to routinely ask for hard reboots to recover CIMC access for memory leaks as an example. I would suggest hunting down a tech support from recently, prior to this reboot, and pulling a new one now, then I would open a TAC case to see what differences can be found there.  But the questions (as I am a TAC engineer) that I would ask would be:

 

Does the CIMC now show those drives in JBOD?

Have you dropped into WebBIOS for the RAID controller in question?

What does WebBIOS show for those drives?

Where is/was the OS installed prior to this reboot?

 

That should be a reasonable amount of data to start troubleshooting with.  If you do decide to open a ticket, PM your SR number to me.

 

 

I figured out what happened. The BIOS was reset to factory defaults when the server lost power.

 

I had to go into the BIOS and change the LOM and PCIe Slot Configuration. PCH SATA Mode had to be set to LSI SW RAID.

After that the LSI raid shows at post like it should. However it looks like the OS is corrupted from the drives falling out of raid.

I may not have any choice but to start over and reload the OS again.

Is it possible to access the SAS storage over the network without having a local OS installed on the server?

Greetings.

If you boot some sort of 'OS on a Stick' ISO via vKVM vmedia (that has the correct NIC and storage drivers), then you could likely read the local file systems, assuming your 2 drives are still in independent AHCI mode.

 

Kirk...

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