we have an old poweredge 2900 generation 1, that was using a Perc H310 raid card that had 2 raid 5 volumes on it that consisted of 4 x 3TB drives each. when the server boots it now reports this error after the integrated LSI raid program runs from DELL bios:
adapter at baseport not responding
no adapter
i can see a light on the card itself, when i try to press control-R to get into the raid bios it doesnt do anything. we have a separate drive for boot with 2008 R2 on it, however with the raid card in the system windows will not boot.
we pulled the card out and put in a Perc 5/i card. we can now boot into windows, when we looked at the drives via MegaRaid, we CAN see all the drives as ready. MegaRaid does not detect the drives as foreign and cannot find any foreign configs to import.
when we go directly into the raid bios on boot it reports the same, foreign config import options are grayed out and there is no volume information, however all the drives are listed. the only option i seem to have is to create new volume information on the controller.
if i create two new volumes and add the drives to them in the order they were on the original card, is there a chance i can access the data if i don't initialize? or will this risk destroying the data? thanks for your input.