Case Study 1: Compaq Proliant Raid 5 System with 2 Virtual Servers

A Compaq Proliant 7 disk Raid 5 system running small business server had a disk failure. The disk was replaced and a rebuild was run on raid system to. The rebuild went 100% but server would not boot. Company contacted HP Business support team who upgraded firmware on server and ran several tests but could not get to the bottom of the problem. We received in 8 disks, 7 in original drive raid array and the new disk used in the rebuild. 1st thing we completed as per all raid systems is we imaged all working drives. The original drive that failed had a motor failure so we promptly completed a motor upgrade on disk and imaged that disk as well. We then diagnosed the system to establish what the problem was. Even though the system reported as the rebuild completing successfully it only ran to 42% and then stopped so a partial rebuild was run on system.

When a rebuild has only partially completed this normally means a lot of data loss. On top of this the system had two virtual servers running on it. Virtual servers have several layers that contain the data. Each layer needs to be decoded to extract the data. We have a solution that we can recode this type of virtual raid system that have had a partial rebuild and recover a large percentage if not all of the data. In this case we recoded and rebuilt the data and processed the two virtual servers for a full recovery.

* We believe we are the only Data Recovery Company in the UK that can recover from failed Raid systems that have several virtual systems running on the same server.