Hello Storage Pros
The setup
I have a Promise VTrak E610f head unit with 2 VTrak 610j expansion units attached to it together giving me over 27 TB of usable storage space.
At the hardware level I slip the storage into 6 parts containing 7 1TB disks and had the parts configured into 6 RAID 6 arrays. In the end; each of the 6 arrays gives me 4.6TB of usable storage space.
On the OS level, I have the storage attached to 2 servers: Windows server 2008 and windows server 2008 R2 over a Qlogic fiber channel switch. Each of the 6 arrays are viewable as basic disks of 4,6Tb which I went on to configure as a single RAID 0 spanned volume of 27TB and for that all the disks had to be converted to dynamic.
The problem
Now comes the problem: On my first attempt to do a firmware update on the VTrak E610f storage; all the volumes were rendered foreign and I had to import them to be able to use them. Although the import was successful, I lost all the set NTFS permissions and SMB share and I had to manually reconfigure them. Upon doing so The OS registered some inconsistencies in the storage and recommended that I ran chkdsk. Since the storage is that big I reluctantly complied and restarted the server.
The first server was restarted BUT chkdsk did not commence as scheduled, the server powered right up. After logging in to inspect; I discovered - to my surprise, that the disks were now shown as invalid in Disk Manager and were no longer visible to the OS. Assuming that maybe a restart of the other server and the storage would set things right, I went ahead to do so but to no avail. After rebooting the entire system (including the storage), the other server also displayed the disks as invalid and were no longer visible to the OS as well.
My question is; how can I make the disk available again from this ‘invalid’ state without losing data?
What I tried but did not help:
- Taking the disks offline and then online again did not work, after the disks were online again, they still appeared as invalid.
- Reactivating the disks threw an error “operation not allowed on an invalid disk pack”
- Calling support of the storage manufacturer: they did not find anything wrong with the system, after 5 hours we had to stop.
- I fear converting the array from dynamic to basic will destroy all the data.
- HxD is showing no errors in the disks
If there is any expert out there with helpful tips; your assistance will be greatly appreciate.
Cheers
John