Failed RAID 5 Controller Help

[J45p3r]

We have a PowerEdge 4400 with and 8 drive backplane with 2 drives RAID 1 and 3 RAID 5. I believe the controller (PERC 3) has failed because it fails to start at boot, so I think the disks might be OK.

What I'd like to know is if I can transfer the 3 RAID 5 drives to another identical machine (3 open slots on the backplane even) and have the drives be recognized? The other machine is in production so I'd like to rule out anything risky to the data on the other server. I have backups of the data on the drives, unfortunately the last recoverable backup was Aug 13. Not the end of the world, but not great to lose 2 weeks of work either.

Thanks

[MixManSC]

I've done similar to this before and it can be done. I do not remember the exact steps though. It does need to be an identical or at least same brand and type controller (ie both the failed controller and the new controller should both be PERC) I believe you plug the three drives and in the controllers firmware setup you should be able to tell it to import the configuration data from the newly detected drives. It should detect the RAID config data on the drives and add the array without any problems.

I've also had this situation where it would not import the config and I had to tell it to create a new raid 5 array on the three new drives - the critical part is to make sure to NOT initialize the newly created array. Reboot and it showed up as normal.

Others here may have some other ideas as well. Best of luck.

[axan]

well raid configs are stored on the drives themselves so ideally you should be able to plug it in to new identical raid card and have the raid setups detected. I've never done it with perc card but it worked fine with highpoint raid controller

[Ockie]

You should be fine to move the drives over provided that you have an identical setup including the same controller. Keep in mind that you may have already loss data when that controller failed.

Good luck.