Friday, January 22, 2010

Repair Windows Server Failure on RAID 5 (3HDD)

Experience on a weekend, make me not sleep in the beginning of 2010...

an IBM old machine.
Windows Server 2003 SP1 unable to boot due to ntoskrnl.exe not found.
1 of 3 SCSI internal disk on RAID5 failure/defunct, mark with amber/orange led.
Boot server using ServeRAID Support CD, found that disk0 (first disk) is defunct/failure.
Luckily the other 2 disks in good condition.
Rebuild the disk0 with right click on it and select Rebuild. Takes 2-3 hours.
Rebuild success (Thanks God...), but since disk0 save the table of content of RAID5, we have to chkdsk the partitions.
Boot using Windows Server OS installation CD (in my case RAID controller detected by Windows Installer CD - no need to remastering to add specific driver if in your case this is required, you can use nlite. RAID controller driver can be found at ServeRAID CD).
Select Repair will give you command prompt. On drive c, do "dir" but error with message "bla..bla...drive enumerated bla bla..."
Googling and fould the next step to repair.
ckhdsk /r to all of the partition. Takes 1-2 hours on every partition (base on your disk size).
fixboot
fixmbr
reboot
Horeeeee.... server back online. But i have to restore the Domain Controller and many files which possibility corrupt, GPO blank :(
Database & Application Server which installed on that server back online.

Recommended : move the database & application server to another machine, change from RAID5 to RAID1 with 1 hotspare and reinstall OS.

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