Issues with hard drives on a server

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Fluttering

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Jul 1, 2013
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10,510
So today I decided to reuse a server that was gathering dust for about a year.
I was starting it up and it was booting through AHCI CD-ROM, it booted Win Server '08 and everything seemed fine. First, I couldn't remember the password so I used a password resetting utility I had on a flash drive lying around.

I reset the password and this time, after trying to boot through cd-rom again, the system couldn't find the OS.

I went to the BIOS (note that I have 4 hard drives, 2 of them in a RAID 1 configuration) and all of them were online and BIOS recognized them, but I couldn't set the system to boot through one of them (using Phoenix TrustedCore Setup Utility) as they were on the "Excluded from boot order" section.

If it makes any difference, the Hard Drive which I believe to have Windows is on the SATA port 3, and in the "Boot priority order" section I had other two hard drives which didn't contain Windows. Note that these two are not the 2 hard drives on a RAID 1 configuration.

After a while messing around with the BIOS I decided to restore it to setup defaults, which left me with two things on the "Boot priority order" section, a "PCI BEV: Embedded RAID CD/DVD-ROM" and a "PCI BEV: IBA GE Slot 00C8 v1327". What happened, what are these and how do I get my system back up and running?

(I have reconfigured the RAID 1 setup, which added another thing to the boot order, but that didn't help.)

Thank you in advance

P.S.: It's also very important that I don't lose any data.
 
Solution
choucove
Be careful. Clearing any of the RAID information on an integrated RAID system especially can completely destroy the RAID array which will basically destroy the data. If you need to protect the data from erase during this process, since you have the drives in RAID 1 mirror, all the data SHOULD be on each drive. Pull out one of the drives you need the data from, put it in another computer, and duplicate the hard drive onto another spare. If you can't duplicate, manually copy files over, though this unfortunately isn't always going to get everything like a full disk clone should.

Do this before you mess with your RAID at all if you value the data on the server or you are playing with a very high risk of data loss.
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popatim

popatim

Titan
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Dec 2, 2009
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PCI BEV: IBA GE Slot.... is your lan card.
Is this a lenovo server?
Well that doesnt matter, we will need the make and model number of the server or motherbd, and the raid card if you have one installed.

edit - I'd like to add that I believe when you reset your bios it set the sata ports back to factory and that setting is not "Raid". So at best you will just need to re-enable raid and the system will recreate them for you and at worst you will have to recreate the raid(s) manually. Start writing down as much as you can remember from that raid bios screen but don't go assigning drives to raids until after you've made backups of your important data. This experience should teach you that raid 1 is not a backup solution and that keeping good notes about your server setup comes in handy years later when you cant remember squat about it.
 
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F

Fluttering

Honorable
Jul 1, 2013
15
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10,510
The server is a Fujitsu Pimergy TX100 S1 and I don't have a RAID card installed.

Should I clear the new RAID configuration then? As I said, I reconfigured the RAID 1 setup.
 
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choucove

choucove

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May 13, 2011
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Be careful. Clearing any of the RAID information on an integrated RAID system especially can completely destroy the RAID array which will basically destroy the data. If you need to protect the data from erase during this process, since you have the drives in RAID 1 mirror, all the data SHOULD be on each drive. Pull out one of the drives you need the data from, put it in another computer, and duplicate the hard drive onto another spare. If you can't duplicate, manually copy files over, though this unfortunately isn't always going to get everything like a full disk clone should.

Do this before you mess with your RAID at all if you value the data on the server or you are playing with a very high risk of data loss.
 
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