What You See
- RAID BIOS shows one drive in “Foreign” state
- Another drive shows as “Missing” or is offline
- Virtual disk won’t mount, and rebuild is unavailable
What It Means
- You’ve likely experienced two drive failures, not one
- One drive dropped or timed out, and the controller assumed it was failed
- The “foreign” one might still be valid — or contain stale config
This situation is extremely common in Dell PERC, LSI, and HP controllers. A brief drive dropout (SATA cable bump, hot-swap misstep) triggers this confusing state.
What Not To Do
- 🚫 Don’t import foreign config without verifying
- 🚫 Don’t clear the config hoping to start fresh
- 🚫 Don’t assume it’s a single-drive problem
Clearing or importing the wrong config can overwrite parity, destroy mapping info, and leave you with zero recovery options.
What You Can Do
- Pause — do nothing until you know which drive has valid metadata
- Use JeannieLite to inspect foreign vs. controller config safely
- Let ADR virtually reconstruct the correct array before you touch a thing
Real-World Tip
This is where most DIY recoveries go wrong. One false step here can destroy the only path to your data. We’ve recovered hundreds of arrays in this exact state — because we didn’t guess.