In case anyone has a similar problem here's a link to the solution I ended up using from Spiceworks: [URL]#entry-7657080 But essentially, I used R-studio to image the discs, ReclaiMe to map the RAID, then back to R-Studio to output a raw disk image of the entire volume, and finally I used linux dd to write that raw file out to a single physical disk. Then within linux I used vmfs-fuse to mount the datastore partition and copy my VMs to another ESXi server to spin them up.
I have an older r715 with the PERC H200 (FW: 16.100.00.00) card in it that has 6 slots on the backplane. It was setup with disks 0-3 as 4 1TB SATA drives setup in RAID10 and slots 4 and 5 had SSDs that were not in a raid array. ESXi 5.5 was running without problems for years. We had some sort of failure last week that showed itself within ESXi when a snapshot consolidation was happening. My vSphere client started getting sluggish then went non-responsive so I went into the server environment and tried to get a look from the CLI and it froze up after a few choices were made. Upon reboot the RAID array was reporting degraded so I launched the bios and saw that disk1 was re-syncing and disk 3 was degraded. So this array was rebuilding from this past Sunday until this morning (Thurs). I had rebooted into ESXi at one point to see if I could at least pull some pertinent data from the effected datastore but ESXi wasn't showing that disk and I didn't want to chance causing further problems trying to force it to load it so we waited the rebuild out. So this morning upon completion of the rebuild I rebooted. The init sequence reported the array was inactive/degraded so I went back in and viewed the array and selected manage and Activated it. it took a minute and wanted to reboot which I allowed and the system reported no boot drive. I checked the BIOS thinking somehow it was confused but then noticed the PERC bios wasn't showing the virtual disk so I went back into it's bios to see that the drives were there but there was no longer a virtual disk. It would allow me to create a new array but I could no longer see the 1.8TB one I had just spent 5 days watching recover. Is there some reason the Activation of the inactive array would have wiped the virt disks ID info? I know that neither the disks nor the array were reinitialized so the data should be there. I just need ideas on how to get back at it. Thanks for any help,dtiKev
PERC H200 RAID10 Activated then gone on R715