The SAS Controller Card in a production server of ours went bad. This was an older server, and Dell does not have the card in stock and not ETA for one. So, I ordered one from NewEgg.
I installed the card, and it's working, somewhat. It's at least reading the drives enough to show me the RHEL splash screen, but it fails to boot, with errors that it can't find /proc, etc. I expected errors since I'm pretty sure there's some data corruption. These were in RAID1.
Anyways, new card works enough – I can get the drives turned on and hear them spinning, it's obviously reading SOME data, since it's showing the RHEL splash screen…so my question is, how do I get access to this data? I've tried booting Ubuntu LiveCD, but it doesn't see the drives.
How can I mount one of these drives within Linux, and get access to what data is still readable?
— EDIT —
Ok, so I put the new SAS RocketRAID card into a different server that has CentOS5.5 installed. It has a Dell SAS card that controls those drives.
I installed the card, and just 1 drive. I then built the kernel module for the RocketRAID, per the company's instructions. When I boot, CentOS is recognizing the drive, I can go to /dev/scsi/rr272x_1x and see that the OS recognizes it (was seen as scsi 5, so it puts a file named '5' in this dir, and when I cat it, shows the drive info.)
But, still can't get at the data…
Tried mounting EVERYTHING shown in /dev/s* (sda, sda1, sda2, sdb, sdb1, sdb2).
Thanks for the answers so far, if anyone can assist further, I'd be much obliged!
Best Answer
Have you tried mounting one of the hard disks in a different machine (or setup the RAID card to run it as a JBOD and try the liveCD again), and recover your data that way?
Given that an alien RAID card can make sense of the existing RAID1 array, I'd say your chances are very high.