Dell PowerEdge server crashed, how to repair? What happened? Information inside

I am currently in high school and run our school's website. This summer, our SysAdmin was diagnosed with cancer, and he went off for treatment, so I have been thrown into an interesting situation.

I'm really not sure what is wrong with this web server, but I would love for your ideas/teaching/input as I am trying to quickly learn so that I can help out.

The server ran/is running FreeBSD, which might mean nothing since this is a hardware issue. I know at one point the server had five identical drives in it (does that mean Raid-5?), but at the point of crash there were three working drives in it ("running in degraded mode?").

About a week ago, the server would not start up because it only found 1 logical drive. I ran the configuration utility and saw this:

I assume there would still be some data left on that one living drive, right? (I do have backups of the web fies, just not the actual OS and Web Server setup).

If there is any information that I need to add so that you can better explain what happened to me, I am more than willing to do that. I am just looking to understand what happened, what this was at one point, and how I can take measures to fix this.

Thank you SO much.

Solution 1:

First, my condolences on your mentor's hospitalization and your baptism by fire into system administration.

Second, my condolences on your data loss. I sincerely hope you have backups.

To summarize your situation:

You have a three-drive RAID array (presumably a RAID-5).
This is one "Logical Drive" (the 3 disks are handled by the RAID controller, and presented to the rest of the system as if they were one drive).

You have lost two of the three drives in the array, and RAID-5 simply can't tolerate two drives failing. (See the post I linked to earlier for more information.)

For all intents and purposes your data is not recoverable -- the only way to recover data from this system would be to ship all three drives out to a data recovery company (a costly prospect).

If you have backups you can begin the process of rebuilding the system on new disks.
Good backups should make the restoration process relatively painless (though depending on the system and what else it's doing -- email, DNS, etc. - that may still be a bit of a project).

If you don't have backups you hopefully have at least a copy of the website (on the workstation you develop on?) and can set up a new server environment and upload your website there, or alternatively rent some shared hosting web space to at least get your school's web presence back up and running.

If you have limited system administration experience and nobody to work with you on this I would recommend the shared hosting route.