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Did I break it or was it already broken?

Jeff7181

Jeff7181

Lifer
So I was working on a server today at work. It's a HP ML370 with a RAID controller. There's a single physical disk in a RAID 0 array that we use for writing backups to. Well, I replaced the server and swapped that backup disk to the new server to start restoring the backups. I enabled the disk using the HP utility, it showed up in the Disk Management Console but didn't have a drive letter assigned and didn't show the size of the disk as I've had it do in the past... just showed "Disk 2." So... I right clicked Disk 2 and selected initialize. Then it recognized the disk with ~68 GB of unallocated space (74 GB SAS drive) as expected but showed no partitions or volumes.

My coworker says I should not have initialized the disk - that erased it. Is that true?
 
"Initialize" can mean various things depending on whether it's done by a RAID controller or by Windows Disk Management. But in Disk Management, it does the following the following to the selected disk or (RAID) virtual disk:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc778404(WS.10).aspx

"When you complete the wizard, the operating system initializes the disk(s) by writing a disk signature, the end of sector marker (also called signature word), and a master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) on the disk. If you cancel the wizard before the disk signature is written, the disk status remains Not Initialized."

As quoted, it creates a new Master Boot Record (which is what tells Windows where to look for the data files). If you need the data, it's time to perform data recovery operations on the disk or array. The data should still be there (although I don't know how to create a single-disk RAID 0 array in the first place).
 
The RAID controller appears to consider it a RAID 0 array with a single physical disk because it's definitely not mirrored and definitely not parity. (shrug)

The people who created the build we use on this server are long gone, but my suspicion is that it may have been done so it would be easy to add a second physical disk later on if more performance was needed.

No data recovery will be necessary as this drive only held backups and the drives that actually hold the data that was backed up are in tact, we just have to recover it from the field so we can yank the disks and pull the data off them. Oops. I guess that's what they get for making me come in on a Saturday to do this without training me on the process. 🙂 However, I believe the disk was hosed before I initialized it because it wasn't being recognized properly even after enabling it in the configuration utility and even reseating it in the drive slot. But hey... I'll take responsibility for it... it's not that big a deal.
 
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If Windows Disk Management said the disk needed to be initialized then, yeah, something was wrong before you initialized it.
 
Thanks for the info. I feel a little better about it now. As I said, I don't have a problem taking responsibility for an error I made, but if I didn't make an error and it was hosed before I touched it, I don't want to shoulder the responsibility for that.
 
Got an answer to my question today. It was already broken. The RAID controller failed completely right before the new server arrived. Then that server failed to boot properly... drives kept dropping out of the RAID5 array. Now we're using a different model server that's not so outdated.
 
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