HP ML350 CPU Fault, Data recovery

[jacktheripper88]

Had this land in my lap today,

A guy brought me an HP ML350 Server that when powered on initially the front LEDs showed a system health issue and a power redundancy failure.
He is unsure what level of RAID they are using for their 3 Hard drives, but the most popular one I have found seems to be RAID 5 for a trio of hard drives.

Now stay with me on this, I did say initially both lights were showing issues...

I thought possibly that one of the PSUs had failed and were interfering with servers functionality, so I powered it down and pulled one out. No more power issue LED but the system health light is still on amber.

Looked inside at the motherboard LEDs and compared it to the manual for the system, the CPU 1 LED is amber meaning CPU failure. Powered the system down, unplugged and power drained, pulled out the PSU that was still connected and pushed the other one back in, still getting an amber light for the CPU.

I have reseated the CPU and blown any dust out of that socket.

The guy did tell my a few years ago a few of the capacitors had been replaced on the motherboard (I didn't do his but I've done others), so due to this fact its leading me to believe that it isn't going to be cost effective for them to buy parts for this server. I suspect that it is actually a fault in the motherboard more then the CPU.

Which leads to my great conundrum: How do I recover their data?D:
This server does have (what I believe) a dedicated RAID controller.
I'm searching google at the moment, but I thought I'd post to see what help I can get.

Thoughts?

 

[mindless1]

Before doing anything else you should have cleared CMOS with the battery out... might just be a scrambled BIOS but check the battery voltage and/or put a new one in.

Getting data off the drives involves either getting that system running again or hooking it up to another mobo (or add-on raid card) with the same chipset and ideally the same RAID bios version, BUT there's always a chance that 3 disks isn't RAID 5, that one was the boot/apps drive and the other two were separate volumes or a RAID1 array... I know that personally, I don't make the server OS drive a member of the data drive(s) unless it's a very simplistic setup with only one drive in the system.

 

[jacktheripper88]

Forgotten to try the CMOS battery, but no luck with that.
I really wish these guys would keep notes on their systems, knowing what RAID it would be fantastic.
Riddle me this, I worked with a guy before that pulled a hard drive out of a system and attempted to read it using a data transfer kit before he realized that drive was part of a RAID array. He ended up breaking the array and the data was unrecoverable. Not sure exactly what he did while he it was hooked up, but will simply hooking one of these drives up to an HD dock cause it to have its RAID screwed up?

 

[VirtualLarry]

but will simply hooking one of these drives up to an HD dock cause it to have its RAID screwed up?

Yes, it can, unless you use a hardware write-blocker.

 

[jsbush]

As long as the RAID controller is intact, the RAID level will still be there. But like you said, most likely RAID5. I don't see it being anything else (production server?).

What generation is the ML350?

 

[mindless1]

We haven't asked a few things such as what is the monetary value of the data? How much monetary loss is there from downtime? In other words what is the budget to fix it?

I could do a bit of research about this system but it may be redundant, things you already know. For example would it run off a standard ATX PSU, even if that PSU is sitting on a box next to it instead of inside, just to see if a different PSU gets it running?

What RAID controller does it use? If your only priority is getting the data off then you might find an alternative mobo with the same raid controller (if not the same main chipset), cheaper than buying an entire identical used server.

What is the CPU? It stands to reason that if you have a replacement CPU, known working board with same raid chipset, and known working PSU, that you should be able to get the data off, although if the rest of the mobo is not the same (northbridge/southbridge) chipset then you might need to do a new OS install on an additional HDD separate from the existing drives to get the system to boot the OS, copy off the data from the raid array.

The obvious alternative is send the drives off to a data recovery specialist.

 

[Burpo]

Less than $100 seems cheap enough.. Which Generation ML350? G5?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Proliant...716463?hash=item3f565a946f:g:DDMAAOSw4HVWFBnx