VMware Cloud Community
Skatan
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

ESXi 4.1 Missing Disk?

Hello everyone,

today I had to upgrade the firmware of my 3ware RAID controller in order to start my - quite old - server with ESXi 4.1. Before this the server wasn't starting at all from one day to another.

Now I face two issues which I am not sure if they existed before.

I have a RAID 10 - configuration (please see attachment) with 6 disks.

Am I right that disk 4 is missing at all and disk 3 has a failure an should be replaced?

Thanks for your help in interpreting the picture!

Daniel

1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
vFouad
Leadership
Leadership
Jump to solution

Ouch Raid 5 with a double failure...

You should really reach out to a data recovery service at this point, as you could damage your chances for getting anything back.

There are a few data recovery people on this forum and there is a KB I'll attach below.

VMware Knowledge Base

Ontrack offers a free data recovery assessment, I think drive savers also does the same.

Kind regards,

Fouad

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

"Did you find this helpful? Let us know by completing this survey (takes 1 minute!)"

View solution in original post

7 Replies
berndweyand
Expert
Expert
Jump to solution

is your storage accessible ?

i wonder what part of the raid the 2 missing disks have? are they spare disks?

if you have 3 mirror sets in your raid10 then the storage cant be accessible anymore

Reply
0 Kudos
Skatan
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

I didn't set this up and even don't understand it ... I only know that there should be 6 disks.

ATM the list looks like in the attachment, which confuses me even more.

Volume is accessible!

Reply
0 Kudos
berndweyand
Expert
Expert
Jump to solution

the attachment couldnt be opened.

also look into the controller bios and verify the configuration - there you should see how the raid is defined and see errors of the disks

is the storage acessible ?

Skatan
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

Will check the controller bios asap.

Today I just had a smart failure - before I upgraded controller firmware.

Also, the storage is acessible now and runs two VMs (as it did the last years).

I add the attachment again and a second one showing the smart failure - these messages were gone later, after firmware update

Edit: seems to be a RAID 50

Reply
0 Kudos
vFouad
Leadership
Leadership
Jump to solution

Ouch Raid 5 with a double failure...

You should really reach out to a data recovery service at this point, as you could damage your chances for getting anything back.

There are a few data recovery people on this forum and there is a KB I'll attach below.

VMware Knowledge Base

Ontrack offers a free data recovery assessment, I think drive savers also does the same.

Kind regards,

Fouad

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

"Did you find this helpful? Let us know by completing this survey (takes 1 minute!)"

Skatan
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

Thanks for your opinion ... I think I will build or buy a new server. The are SAS drives impossible to find for a decent price.

Reply
0 Kudos
vFouad
Leadership
Leadership
Jump to solution

Another option may be to purchase an external SAN/NAS solution.

Then you could have multiple servers attached to the same "shared" storage. This would give you the ability to have extra compute/compute redundancy, and most modern (even low end) SAN/NAS options have data integrity alerting and usually some form of upgrade support.

I hope you have a good backup of the data on the array and that your recovery process isn't painful.

In any case I would export the VM's you have access too as an ovf/ova as soon as possible in case the RAID drops off again.

Kind regards,

Fouad

Reply
0 Kudos