New Mobo: Foreign drives cannot be imported as they don't form a complete configuration

[zitt]

I had my 9266-8i working perfectly as I think Raid 6 with 4 qty 3TB Red drives and 1 2TB SATA caching drive on my x299 motherboard. This weekend; I upgraded to a W709E-SAGE workstation board.
All I did was transplant the controller card onto the new motherboard. The system an 850W PSU and I upgraded to a 1300W psu because this new xeon has a 300W TDP.

Anyway; I'm sure that I didn't exactly re-attach the cables into the correct configuration because now the controller says there is no volume. I attempted to "Scan Foreign Configuration" but I'm getting an error "Foreign drives cannot be imported as they don't form a complete configuration"

I tried with and without the SSD installed. Same error.

Ofcourse; I foolishly didn't make a backup of the raid volume as I got lazy and excited to get the new system online.

What can I do if anything? Why are all the drives being seen - but the Storage Manager cannot import the configuration?

 

[ano]

probably remove all drives, clear the controller (with drives out) then import again

but.. sure you getting it to see all thedrives?

 

[zitt]

but.. sure you getting it to see all thedrives?

yes. 4 rotational drives and 1 SSD were seen. I'll double confirm tonight when I boot the box as suggested. You can see the rotational drvs in the screenshot above (behind the popup). Blue arrows.

Specifically what does "clear the controller" mean? (not in front of box right now)

 

[zitt]

I was not able to "import foreign configuration" no matter what I did. Unclear way.

To resolve the issue; I put the MegaCLI efi binaries on a usb stick and booted my system. I had to use my WSL2 ubuntu installation to use wget from the link at LSI Preboot EFI packages for flashing LSI products .

I then used the information available here:

Configuring JBOD with a LSI 2208 controller — Lucid Solutions

PMEnableJBOD PDMakeGood PDMakeJBOD

plone.lucidsolutions.co.nz

to configure my card as JBOD. Namely:
MegaCLI.efi AdpSetProp EnableJBOD 1 -aALL
I then did all the PDMakeGood on just the mechanical drives.
Followed by the PDMakeJBOD commands on the mechanical drives.

With that the board was configured in JBOD and I was able to boot into Windows and see all the rotational drives in device manager.

I then downloaded ReclaimMe Free RAID Recovery and installed it. Powered down and installed a spare HDD (bigger than the raid array). I knew mine old array was 5+TB and I had a USB3 10TB easy store. I de-shucked it and put the SATA drive on a spare sata port on motherboard (of course I powered down first).

With the new HDD installed; followed the tutorial here:

RAID Recovery Software - the only FREE tool

Need to recover a failed RAID? Do not rush to send it to a lab, try our read-only free RAID recovery software which recovers most common RAID types.

www.freeraidrecovery.com

and was able to "Write array to disk" selecting the 10TB de-shucked drive as destination. About 48hrs later - yes; it was painfully slow... I had all the data "restored" to the 10TB drive.

Once I confirmed the data was intact (checking some JPEGS for corruption); I shutdown, went back into EFI and turned off JBOD mode using the
MegaCLI.efi AdpSetProp EnableJBOD 0 -aALL
command. I don't know that it was required that I turn off JBOD for the next step; but I assumed so.

I then recreated a new virtual drive under "Mega Raid Storage Manager" in windows. And used a hard drive cloing software to copy the data from the 10TB back to the RAID array - new virtual drive.

Once I confirmed the data was restored to the new virtual drive; I powered down, removed the 10TB drive and re-shucked the drive into the usb enclosure.

More painful than I'd hope... but, ultimately, successful. Hope this helps a future Googler.

Moral of the story - don't be lazy. If I'd make a backup to the10TB drive in the first place - there'd been a lot less pain.