iscsi corruption

carlosvalcarcel · Tue Dec 14, 2010 5:55 pm

we had an issue with our small business server. The server was connecting an iscsi drive (G:) to run exchange backups and also keep files some of which where being backup to tape and others that where not. The system was setup on windows 2008 and all connections where fine and it had been running for well over a year. This past saturday we got errors on the sbs 2003 server about exchange which is an error that i have seen before. The error produces a behavior in the server that is very peculiar. You get not error messages but you start to experience login delays and performance delays. After that you finally get an error but it is exchange related which is what is causing this nightmare over limits set by the exchange system which have no relationship to the OS at all. Over time the server gets worst to the point where only hard boot will allow you to work unless you are willing to spend 20 to 30 minutes for any click response (i have done this twice). We had the failure start on saturday night and that is the last time that the iscsi worked for us also. After we found out and rebooted the server we found out that the iscsi server also impossible to access. I looked at the iscsi server logs and there is nothing really standing out to hardware or even serious software failures. But it needed to be hardboot. When I finally was able to connect both servers after doing a fix to prevent some of these issues it said to me that the server iscsi can connect but it wanted to change the drive type. After trying to agree to this the server would not mount the drive because it said that it had a bad block. I checked the iscsi drive and there is nothing there. I just would like to extract the information from the img file and recreate it if possible but with some modifications to size and what I am doing with the iscsi unit which has worked great until this event. Could you please tell me how I can recover information if any and or what else I could do to make this happen.

thank you

Tue Dec 14, 2010 9:23 pm

1) Mount image as RAW disk and run recovery as it would be locally attached hard disk and not iSCSI volume. Should work fine.

2) As you've provided zero information about version you run, no system and StarWind logs and did not describe exact scenario you've been using I have no idea what was it. Start with filling the gaps and we'd find out what was it. Sooner or later.