Good morning,
I'm new to this community and I do not have a thorough knowledge of the EVA4400, so I apologize in advance if I will write something inappropriate, but I need your experience to understand if what I want to do is possible.
On our EVA4400 there was a DISKGROUP (with n.9 HDD in SINGLE protection level) that contained n.5 VDISKs configured in VRAID1.
Over time, n.3 HDD have failed (I do not know in what time and if any leveling has been successful), but as long as n.6 HDD good remained, everything worked fine (DISKGROUP=Active, VDISKs=Online): as soon as a fourth HDD has failed (n.5 HDD good remained), all VDISKs have become unavailable.
After several attempts to extract and reinsert the filed HDDs, we decided to send all HDDs to a data recovery company (Kroll Ontrack), which was not able to recover the files of our interest, or rather it has recovered some files which however are corrupt.
Having available all the screenshots of the old configuration, I thought to recreate a new DISKGROUP with the same name and the same properties as the original one (we have enough spare HDDs available), then create the same VDISKs with the same names and properties of the original ones (possibly setting the WORLD_WIDE_LUN_NAME's as the original ones, through SSSU tools).
At that point, imagining that the membership of a HDD to a specific DISKGROUP is based on the WWN in some EEPROM of its electronic card, I thought to turn off the SAN, extract the HDDs of the new DISKGROUP, remove their electronic card to replace the card of the original HDDs, then reinsert the original HDD's and turn on the SAN again.
I kindly ask you a feedback on this possible solution to recover the original state of my configuration (although faulty), before it was canceled, restarting from which I hope to be able to repair the last HDD that has failed (since until a moment before everything worked fine ) and resurrect the VDISKs to access their data.
Thanks.
Matteo.