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Wow - it actually happened!

G

GreyMittens

Member
I lost a drive last Thursday in a raid 5 array on a proliant m150 g2. HP had a drive orderec out for me ASAP but it was delayed in Toronto due to bad weather (they had none in my city). Well this morning about 5 hours before the replacement arrived, we lost a 2nd drive in the array! OH NOS11!! /me makes home alone face

At the very least it's good experience now on AD disaster recovery! (tries to think positive)

I've heard about this happening, but the odds of losing two drives in a 5 disk array is *very* remote that it makes me wonder if the controller itself may have issues (adaptec 2120s) . A textbook Monday to say the least!



 
Hit the Undo button on your forehead a whole bunch of times, then add a hot spare to the array. Time machine not included, sold separately 🙂
 
The servers we have also have spare hot-swaps.

I guess it's plausible that 2 can fail because they're likely from the same batch. Good luck with your restores!
 
Originally posted by: ITJunkie
so you were the one screaming DOOOOHHHHH
Click to expand...

Hahah, yes that was me.

Actually this has been a great (as far as it can be) experience so far. It's been a long time since I've dealt with AD disaster recovery and about time I went for a refresher. I unfortunately don't have a lot of time in my day to day work to run tests in a lab so I just rely on a ton of reading prior to initiating the process. In this case it worked out well as I've got to wait for another drive to arrive yet (hp sending to my house via courier tonight).

I cannot get another controller right now, just 2 drives. I'll update the firmware though as a start before I get going on the OS. I also have to double check the original manufacturer of the drives... OMG if they are Maxtor I am going to lose it 🙂

Anyhow, the server has been removed from AD via ntdsutil and adsiedit, we have a small user base of only 100 or so (and exchange 03') so I plan to do basically a fresh install and dcpromo this bad boy. Thankfully it is only a file server, dc, gc and dhcp so no sql or exchange on the box itself. (just exchange will take a little longer for the schema to replicate during dcpromo).

Then it's just a matter of restoring the data from tape (see gang, raid is not a backup solution! 🙂 ) and setting up a few shares. Oh, and installing Veritas and Symantec.

Anyhow, not really a 'tech support' based post but I thought I'd share my story with you guys here as I really thought 2 drives going South in a raid5 is rare.

Just hope it's all running before my vacation starts this Friday!

Cheers.

gm
 
It is very rare, but I would look into getting that hot spare. I have a hot spare in about half of my servers (the important ones). Since all of my servers use the same type of drive, I can mix and match hot spares to whatever server might need it. I have only lost 2 drives in 3 years, so not too bad.
 
Well the recovery process has gone alright so far. The box is back up and once again a DC, dcpromo ran w/o a hitch... my only fear was that perhaps i might have missed something in the removal of it adsiedit or something (though i did run through everything twice there just to make sure 🙂 )

Now the long part, I have to wait to catalog the tape, the restore all the data... about 80gb or so, the catalog will take about 2 hrs and probably another 2 or so for the restore (LTO 2)

While this server isn't a mission critical one to us, for the price of a hotswap drive it's cheap insurance and I'll be doing an inventory of all our servers in our org for those. Currently most boxes are raid 5 with daily backups, but even in the rare case, it's a PITA to lose an array.

Cheers!

 
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