I'm trying to help out my former employer (I haven't worked there in 8 years); they have an old server that has suddenly gone belly up and it appears that the motherboard is failing and no longer recognizes the Adaptec 2120S SCSI controller no matter which of the two 64bit Pci slots it's plugged into. I got a working spare and tried that but the same thing. About two years ago their DLT backup drive seized and they never replaced it (they've been going through a severe financial crisis) so they have no recent backups and no DLT drive to hookup to another computer to try and restore the data; not to mention that they used a really old version of Arcserve which won't work on any modern OS.
So I believe that the SCSI data drive is in good working order so ideally I'd like to try and read the data off of it. I got my hands on an Adaptec ASC-29320LPE and I installed it into one of my own newer servers and hooked up the hard drive. The controller recognizes it but once I get into the OS I'm asked to format the drive. I'm going on the idea that the SCSI adapter is not properly detecting the geometry of this drive which is why it's asking me to format it. The hard drive is an HP model BD14686225 a 146.8GB 10,000 RPM Wide Ultra 320; I checked the cards options and I'm not sure that I see any way to manually set the geometry and I'm not sure how I would determine what the geometry should be. Does anyone have an idea if that's even possible short of sending it out for data recovery?
I should have included this information (my fault) the drive was not in any kind of raid configuration; it was in fact the only hard drive attached to the SCSI Raid controller. When I first swapped in the Adaptec 2120S and tried switching the cards slot and booted the old server I did manage to get the drive to show back up in the servers OS (Server 2003) but the system gave some kind of error and rebooted before I could backup everything. And yes when the system that I have it attached to boots up and I log in and check disk manager it asks to initialize the drive. After this didn't work I also found an Adaptec 2940UW which I believe is a compatible raid card and I have an old XP system that I haven't recycled yet (I keep it for some legacy stuff but almost never use it) and I installed the drivers and attached the drive and it seems like the same problem. (asks to initialize the drive) Maybe there actually is something wrong with the drive itself even though I briefly had it working.