Poweredge R630: How screwed is my Virtual Disk/Server?

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TechAlien7

New Member
May 14, 2024
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Hello,

I have a customer who's R630 is not successfully booting.

We were getting Error UEFI0116.

With Error UEFI0116 we were not able to boot to System Setup through F2. It was giving us only access to the Integrated RAID Controller Configuration Utility which showed;

Virtual Disk 0: VDisk1, RAID10, 2.181TB, Failed.


I was also able to check the Associated Physical Disks and it was only showing bays 2,5,6,7.


I had to make some changes in order to clear that error and be able to boot and access any other menus. I tried troubleshooting with the information the customer provided and seeing if any possible bios changes through a potential firmware update were giving us errors that were not allowing boot to fully complete.

Unfortunately we kept hitting that wall:
"Virtual Disk 0: VDisk1, RAID10, 2.181TB, Failed."

I saw a number of logs like this:

//
Disk 0 in Backplane 1 of Integrated RAID Controller 1 is not functioning correctly.
Virtual Disk 0 on Integrated RAID Controller 1 has failed.
Disk 0 in Backplane 1 of Integrated RAID Controller 1 was reset.
//


...

I have continued troubleshooting and moved some disks around to test the bays and my results are weird. For example, some disks work on some slots but not others. ie; Disk 0 will not work in Bay 0, but will work in Bay 6. Then it stops working completely.

Other times the menu "Physical Disk Management" will show

"Physical Disk 00:01:02: HDD..."

Sometimes it will show:

"Physical Disk --:--:02: HDD..."

=============================================

My issue are...

I don't have a working configuration to compare this to.

I don't have any information on this system from the customer.

His brother set it up long ago and he is now retired and does not know much about the system or how it was configured.

I know the RAID was in RAID10, but that is all.

I don't know if there were any hot spares. I don't know what is the minimum amount of drives we need to rebuild the RAID. (IF we were to get Data Recovery on some possibly failed drives.)

I am drawing at straws trying to fix this.

The customer suggested I re-seat the PERC controller and cabling with the power off. (Probably suggested by his brother). Now no previous virtual disks show.

=============================================

Some questions:

1) Back when there was a Virtual Disk in the PERC Menu; I went to View Associated Physical Disks and it only showed 2,5,6,7. Does this mean this was the ONLY disk Associated? Or was it only showing the Associate disks that were available?

2) How screwed is this system? I read once a RAID reaches Failed State it is difficult to recover. Customer did absolutely no maintenance on this system and left it very neglected. His main goal is to get one data file for his "Dispatching Software".

Worst comes to worst we can't fix this RAID, but would we be able to at least use Data Recovery to try to find this specific file?

Help much appreciated.