Server damaged and wanting advice on RAID

[mrstephenw]

Hi Guys,

We had our main school server damaged by water over the Xmas period and we're due to receive a replacement today. The server that is now redundant (Intel S5000VSA Board, 2 x 4 core XEON, 8gb RAM, MS Server 2003) was built by myself and I had put a lot of work into setting it up with ActivDirectory, applying GPs, shares, etc.

Instead of building a new server up I've opted to purchase a prebuilt HP server (ML330, 8gb Ram, 2 x 4 core XEON, MS Server 2003).

The old server won't fire up but I'm confident the hard drives (1 System HDD and 2 HDDs on RAID 0) are still okay.

I first of all want to know if I can rescue the data on the RAID given that it's no longer driven by the RAID hardware on the OLD motherboard? I'm not that familiar with RAID and recovery and I would guess it's not just a case of setting up RAID on the new HP server and firing the two HDDs up - maybe I'm wrong?

Secondly I'd like advice on the System HDD. As I said I spend about 100 hours setting up Server 2003 exactly how we wanted it and we were almost ready to switch over to this server before it got 'rained on' by a leaking frozen pipe. Would it be best to start from scratch or can I rescue the hard work that I've achieved upto press? Maybe carry over the AD database or something?

Your advice will be invaluable

[sted]

if you can get access to the system drive maybe you could convert it to a vhd (with disk 2 vhd) install 2008 svr on your new box and virtualize it might be at least worth a go as to raid i suspect unless you can find another pc with the same controller its probably going to be an uphill battle but if its a pci/pcie raid card might be worth trying that in an expendible pc

[nephilim]

As sted said it should be doable to make it a virtualised machine.

[mrstephenw]

Okay, yeh, that makes sense. I'll look into it. I'm not upto sketch with Virtualisation using a HDD as one of the virtual machines (which is what I think is been suggested).

I've used SUN VirtualBox before, will this get me to where I want to be?

[zag]

You wont be able to get the raid back without the original card, thats one of the downsides to raid.

I would personally start from scratch unless you have a system backup.

Virtualizing would prevent this kind of thing happening in the future.

[squeeky]

ESXi will do what you want. Or vmware server on a linux distro

[mrstephenw]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I have it in hand now and I'm back to where I left off.

Nice one,

Steve

[IanT]

RAID0 on a server!

[mrstephenw]

I did contemplate that but figured it would be okay given that the final part of the plan was to perform an online backup each evening, therefore people would benefit from the speed increase.