[Disaster] Failover cluster - shared storage failure

We have a major issue with our failover cluster.

One of the cluster shared volumes has stopped working.

The shared volumes are all iSCSI from an HP MSA2312i, the volume in question was Volume 3 and connected to LUN4

While attempting to connect a new volume, it was noticed that there was an error with volume 3 - it was showing error 5120 (degraded)

The volume was accessible and all the servers running from it were OK.

I attempted to move the volume to another host to resolve the issue but this didn't help.

So I took it offline and attempted to then bring it back online.

This is where the problem started!!!

The disk came back online but didn't have anything associated to it, say it needed an NTFS volume. Checking in disk management a dialogue box appeared (can't remember what is said, but I clicked OK)

Now in disk management the drive is showing as unallocated space.

I've checked on the SAN and there are no errors.

If I right click on the drive in disk management I can only create a simple volume on the drive.

Has the drive contents gone? Is there anyway I can recover it? Am I in for a mammoth restore session tomorrow?

Any help is extremely welcome.

I'm now working on the assumption the data is still there but the boot sector has got mashed.

Can anyone recomment some good server partition recovery software?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by steve

We have a major issue with our failover cluster.

One of the cluster shared volumes has stopped working.

The shared volumes are all iSCSI from an HP MSA2312i, the volume in question was Volume 3 and connected to LUN4

While attempting to connect a new volume, it was noticed that there was an error with volume 3 - it was showing error 5120 (degraded)

The volume was accessible and all the servers running from it were OK.

I attempted to move the volume to another host to resolve the issue but this didn't help.

So I took it offline and attempted to then bring it back online.

This is where the problem started!!!

The disk came back online but didn't have anything associated to it, say it needed an NTFS volume. Checking in disk management a dialogue box appeared (can't remember what is said, but I clicked OK)

Now in disk management the drive is showing as unallocated space.

I've checked on the SAN and there are no errors.

If I right click on the drive in disk management I can only create a simple volume on the drive.

Has the drive contents gone? Is there anyway I can recover it? Am I in for a mammoth restore session tomorrow?

Any help is extremely welcome.

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The box in disc management didn't ask you to initialise the disc did it?

If so the boot sector is probably a little worse for wear! I would look on the backups first rather than try to recover the partition as you may spend a lot of time trying for no reward.

The only recovery software I have used has been file level, I have not tried the partition level recovery software, I believe something along the lines of testdisk does support it though but wouldn't know what results you would get :s

It turned out the master boot record was fried.

After finding a recommendation for r-studio on edugeek I downloaded that and proceeded with a recovery scan.

15 hours later and all the files were found and recoverable.

Managed to get back everything :)

Could have used backups for important stuff but had a couple of development servers that weren't being backed up.