Data Restoration -RAID5 - 3HDD

[Divya2931]

Hi There,

We have a Dell R710 with 3 HDD in RAID5. One of the hard disk failed and server went down and couldn’t boot with a 'boot error' message.

We swapped with a new HDD and RAID rebuild process completed and restarted. However, it stopped with the same error message 'boot error'

The server is running VMware standalone ESXi 6.5 with approx 6 to 7 VMs.

Is there a possibility to repair this situation or restore the data from other 2 working HDDs?

Thanks for your earlier response

[a_p_]

What you may try, is to boot the host from an ESXi 6.5 installation media, without actually installing ESXi to find out whether the VMs are still accessible.

To do this boot from the media. At the ESXi 5 seconds count down press Shift-O, delete runweasel from the boot options, and press Enter. Once ESXi is up, you can login using root with a blank (no) password.

Caution: The above may modify data. If you plan/need to have important data restored by e.g. a data recovery company, do not try anything that could make things even worse.

André