I'm new here but I've run out of options for my search on this issue my team is having. To give a relatively short backstory; I know almost nothing about SQL beside what I've learned from a short time perusing the internet for answers on certain issues. I was hired specifically for VMWare issues(since most of the "equipment" is VMs) but ive since expanded into uncharted territories, so to speak, in order to assist with other pressing matters, so please excuse my ignorance if this may be an easy answer. I should also state that the "genius" behind the setup of most of our network quit suddenly when asked to provide documentation on how to use everything in the event that he wasn't available since no one else knew how to do his job, two years or so ago, and we've been trying to recover since.
As for the current issue, our cluster consists of two nodes and a Quorum, running SQL 2016 and SSMS 13, that only two other admins and, now, myself use. Apparently, for almost two years or so now, the secondary has been giving the team issues and they had left it powered down and just running off of the primary and Quorum. One of the previous admins had decided this was best since it was acting up and it worked perfectly fine with it off. Flash forward to sometime last year and another admin, not in the loop, decided to power the secondary on, and it began working fine, strangely, as if it was never taken down and no one noticed a difference.
Shortly after i started, this past December, it began acting up again. I went to check it and noticed the server was stated to be "offline" but with an "uptime" ticker still going. I was curious to see if maybe it was set to failover if the primary went down by simulating an outage and it didn't. The secondary remained offline and the cluster went down. I then decided to remove it from the cluster and re-add it back in, however the cluster still believed it is a part of it so attempting to re-add the server gave me an error as such. After looking around i found that i would just need to make sure the cluster service is running and run a few PowerShell commands to remove and re-add it forcefully. However i ran into the issue where the Cluster Service wouldn't start and wouldn't let me start it manually or forcefully, it just gives me a generic error and none of solutions to fix it would end up working.
My main question for this long and convoluted explanation, is this:
If i were to destroy the failover cluster and then create a new one, adding in both of the servers and the quorum and resyncing the databases, would that be plausible or would i be better off just starting completely from scratch? I'm just at a total loss as to what to do, especially with my lack of knowledge and experience on this topic, along with the fact that i am still learning how the "genius" created this mess. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
EDIT: We are also in an air-gapped network due to most of our systems being confidential so i wouldn't be able to provide logs or anything of the sort sadly.
