Failed Raid 5 HDD Caused Server Crash

[sobak]

Yesterday I ran into an interesting problem, I have a NetWare 4.11 server running on a Dell PowerEdge 4300 with a PERC II RAID Card. Yesterday at about 3:30pm one of my Hard Drives failed and the RAID system spent about a hour trying to get the drive back online before it finally failed over to my hot spare.

Right after the RAID determined the HDD was no longer working and it began to rebuild the RAID Array my server went into ABEND with a Processor Exception Error.

Upon rebooting the server the system would run VRepair on the volume but would immediately go into ABEND while running VRepair on the SYS volume. I finally got the system to go through a complete VRepair and is currently back up online operating at 100% but I would like to know why the server went into ABEND while the RAID was rebuilding. All my servers are running the current patch (SP9A) and I have had no other problems with them other than this.

I will probably never know why this happened but would like to bounce this around and see if other people have had the same situation that I have had or if there is a know problem with NetWare 4.11 and a hardware RAID 5 rebuild.

david e
*end users are just like computers, some you can work with...others just need a simple reBOOTing to fix their problems.*

 

[TheLad]

I use Compaq kit and have been unfortunate to have the odd hard drive failure. Basically, with the Compaq's it is all done by the SCSI card so server utilization does not go up. The drive fails, the system restripes the data onto the activated online spare, job's a good'un.

When you replace the failed drive, the system restripes the data to the new disk, then the online spare deactivates. Never had any problems?

Only thing I can suggest is to ensure that you are running the latest firmware on your server hardware, SCSI card and hard disks. -----------------------------------------------------
"It's true, its damn true!"
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[sobak]

Thanks I'll check that. I've never had any problems with my RAID before but of course this is the first time I lost a drive in the array. Strange thing is that VRepair found tons of errors on my Sys volume during it's run. That was one of the things that worried me. I would think the raid card wouldn't corrupt the data on Sys. It also corrupted my NDS, during the reload process of the server DS would not load and I had to run DSRepair on it. Once I got all the errors corrected then the server came up without any problem at all. In the mean time the RAID card was restriping the data in the background. The entire problem just hit me a strange that the failed Hard Drive would cause this much problems on NetWare while running RAID 5. Fortunately we were only down for about 2 hours and all my data was intact (if you don't count my CAD Files that were open when the server went down).

david e
*end users are just like computers, some you can work with...others just need a simple reBOOTing to fix their problems.*