4300 RAID Controller HELP NEEDED!!!

[Mojolnir]

Hello,

I have a Poweredge 4300 running NT4.0 with a RAID 5 array. Yesterday, 1 of the drives stopped working. The light on the front of the bracket shows that it is online (not failed) but I cannot see the drive in FAST. When I look at the partition view, the partition for that drive shows a gray flag (Phantom partition??). Looking at the slot view of the controller, (under the failure column) all of the other drives say critical & the one missing says nothing (---------).

Now then, I have tried insert/Remove with pausing I/O first but it didn't work.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[galileo3000]

Backup your data. You need to rebuild your array, but need to protect yourself before you do it. If I remember right you need to check to see how the raid controller sees the drive. The drive probably needs to be replaced in this raid 5. Call Dell T/S and ask them for help rebuilding this array. I do not remember all of the details.

 

[NickFerrar]

Is the server under warranty? If so just get Dell to replace the drive, the engineer will rebuild it into the array (you won't lose data). It is worth backing the whole thing up first though just in case. If it's not under warranty you just need to buy a drive yourself and do the same thing, I can't actually remember the option names to get the arrary to absorb the new disk.

The other drives show as critical because with one drive dead in the array it is no longer fault-tolerant.

 

[Mojolnir]

Thanks for your help.

The one that was not showing up was the bad one. I replaced it, initialized it & configured it for failover & it worked perfectly.

Thanks again.

 

[ptlinva]

I've got a my first Dell. It is a PowerEdge 6300. My other servers have all been Compaq's 1850s and 3000s.

I believe my Dell has had a drive failure. The yellow light (below the power light) is blinking. Also when booting, the BIOS reports that the array (which consists of 4x18 gig drives in RAID5 configuration) is in CRITICAL state.

The lights on the drives all look normal except for the 1st one which doesn't show the activity that the others do after booting. During bootup, it blinks and looks just fine like the other drives.

Assuming that this is the bad drive, can I do a hotswap replace like I do with my Compaqs? Should I do a shutdown and swap the drive first? Is there a way to verify which drive is the bad one before pulling it out? I went into the PERC's bios (control/a) and it saw all the drives just fine.

Also, since I built this machine as 4x18 gigs in a raid 5 array, is there an easy way to upgrade this array to include an online spare as a backup in case of a future drive failure?

Thanks in advance for your time and consideration.

Paul Laudenslager
paul@virginia.com

 

[bfralia]

On the 6300 you can do a hot swap of the bad drive and it should rebuild. for an 18GB drive, the rebuild can take hours.