ServeRAID - Remove drive.

[shurton]

After a drive failure in one of the arrays, I accidentally selected remove drive instead of replace drive. After doing this, the drive was removed from the array, and I am not able to put it back. My only option now is to make it a hot spare.
Question: After a defunct drive is removed from a RAID5 array (6 drives to 5), is my array still RAID5 protected? or is my next drive failure in that array going to cause a failure? ServeRAID manager shows no errors.

Thanks...

 

[techieGeek]

Hi,

Is the drive copmpletely removed from the array?
if so what you need to do is do a Logical Drive Migration.
This is where you can add a new drive into an excisting array to either extend available space in the logical drive or to extend the partitions created already.
A few points worth mentioning with this is:
1: If you select the first method you will only increase the space so that you can create a new array later, as this does not particular sound like what you are trying to do I believe what you will want is the second option I mentioned with the LDM.
The second option will extend the excisting partitions in a percentage wise way which means that you can not decide how much weach of your logical drives gets bigger (this again only has an effect if you are having more then one logical drive)
The third thing worth mentioning is that you should update your ServeRAID code and firmware to the latest level before starting this operation.
Finally if you are not familiar with Logical Drive migration I suggest you go to

http://www.ibm.com/redbooks

and look for the following book:
Netfinity Server disk sub systems which can be downloaded as a pdf.
If you turn to page I believe it is 91 in the book there will be some more description about LDM.

Hope this helps you with your problem

Regards

Martin