RAID help for Linux Server

[josephwashington]

Hi guys, need a little help with a Linux server that is causing me massive problems. Basically one of the disks went down so i took it out of the server and initialised it in a windows machine which i think was a big mistake. I then put it back into the server and started the server up.

However as soon as i turned the machine on the screen came up stating that there was one complete drive(the one i took out and initialised) and 7 incomplete drives, these being the other 7 that were in there before working fine. After this screen appears the machine then goes on to try and start as normal but it cant as it doesnt recognise that there are any hard drives in the machine so its not finding any operating system. I then get a message saying intel boot agent failed.

Is there anything i can do to get this machine working again?

I've tried taking out the drive that i initialised and starting it without it but this didnt work. I then tried creating a disk using boot.img and rawrite but this didnt work either as i couldnt recover anything as theres no hard drives!

Any help that you guys could give me would be much appreciated.

[Rob Pomeroy]

What was your RAID configuration before all this happened?

[josephwashington]

I think it was RAID 5, im not sure because i have taken over from previous guy who set it up, but assume its level 5 as thats what all the others have been set to

[Rob Pomeroy]

I'm at a slight dead end here.  Rebuilding a RAID 5 array is difficult, but possible.  I have never needed to attempt it.

You might try following the suggestions at the bottom of >this< link, possibly booting off a live Linux CD first (e.g. Knoppix).

[josephwashington]

thank you for your time and help. i tried creating a boot disk using rawrite and the boot.img file, when loading the disk i am prompted with 5 options. One of which is rescure, however when i follow the menu through it asks for a harddrive to use, but as my RAID isnt working i cant get past this stage. Is there any advice you could give me?

[Rob Pomeroy]

No, that won't work, Joseph.  It's not a normal rescue that you need - it's a RAID rebuild.  That's why I'm suggesting booting a live Linux CD - then you'll have a running system from which you can use the raidhotadd command.  It's worth a shot and that's what I would try next, in your position.