Long and short, got an old 15 bay server few years ago, and made it into my file server (i am unemployed so a lot of second hand hardware was used)
amongst the hardware used was a HP raid card (p410i w/ 1gb ram module), and this worked fine, had 2x4 drive raid5’s running off it
when suddenly my server stopped picking it up. so i tried it in another computer and it didn’t show up on that either.
SO i did what i thought was a good idea and bought a cheap LSI raid card off ebay, thinking that it might pick up the raid config and atleast let me access the arrays.
as you can guess, this wasn’t the case
I haven’t rebuilt or deleted the drives, only booted up and saw the card found the drives and it said they were unconfigured
What can i do? i can look at getting another p410i, but the nearest ones are in china and will take 4 weeks to get to me (I am in Austrralia)
Does the LSI card pick up the drives at all? Your problem may not be the card, but the drives. Your OS should be able to read SMART data, so see what it reports about your drives. There’s also the possibility the OS is at fault, but that might be a slim chance. Still, to exclude it, get yourself an sysrescuecd iso image, make a bootable media from it and boot your server from that media.
If the LSI card picks up the drives but not configures them, you may need to import the array into the card controller. Alternatively, if you’re on Linux, see if a software RAID works (assuming you now have the drives in a hardware RAID).
Does the HP card show up at all during boot? Can you get into it’s config? If the LSI card isn’t seeing a foreign config, the array will not be able to be imported to that card. You may end up having to buy another card of a similar or the same firmware as the HP card. But unfortunately that isn’t a guarantee either especially if there is a different issue going on.
If the data isn’t crucial, I would suggest purchasing an HBA or see if you can flash that LSI card you bought into IT mode. Then use ZFS, BTRFS, or Windows storage spaces to stitch the drives together exactly the way you want.
The HP card doesn’t show up at all during boot, the LSI cards are seeing the drives and reporting them as “unconfigured good”
Sadly the data is somewhat crucial, if that was the case i’d look at just starting a clean new raid
that said, do you know any guides on flashing LSI cards, might be good to look at doing that anyway
In that case, your question is thus: “how do I import a foreign array in my LSI card?”, right?
Well, there’s tons of howto’s available, but as we don’t know which LSI card you have, you’ll have to search for it yourself Just add the model number in your preferred search engine (probably not Google, given your location ) with the key words foreign array should yield suitable results, I reckon.
Just add the model number in your preferred search engine (probably not Google, given your location 
) with the key words foreign array should yield suitable results, I reckon.