Utility State = STARTED DEGRADED ??????????

[angelo23]

Hello,

We have a Sun SparcStorage Array that holds 30 4.2 GB drives... We are using Sun Volume Manager 2.4 along with that... I'm a little confused in that my one of my Volumes is showing that the Utility State is "Started Degraded"... Why is it Degraded and how do I correct it so that it is not in the Degraded State..??? Does the Volume have to be rebuilt or what?? AnyHelp would be appreciated...

Thanks
Angelo23

 

[oreis]

Do you have raid 5 or 3 on your system? Are there any disks with problems? If so, exchange the disk. The problem should disapear.

 

[angelo23]

No BAD disk in the Array.... We are using RAID 5...

 

[oreis]

How many disks are in that degraded raid 5 unit? When it was created how many disks did it had? Maybe your are on the limit of number of disks for that raid 5 drive to continue to operate, check it out if you can.
What I'm trying to say is that when a raid 5 drive is working in degraded mode, if another disk fails your system will come down, maybe that drive should have more disks.

Try checking the original configuration.
for example if you have createed raid 5 ld with 3 disk's and you remove one, the raid 5 unit will continue to operate, but in degraded mode.

 

[angelo23]

Hey Oreis,

Thanks again for replying to my problem and trying to help...
In regard to the VOLUME that has the utility state of "Started Degraded"... Not to sure what you mean when you say that I might be at the limit for the number of disks for that raid5 drive to continue to operate..?? Are you refering to the Volume that is degraded and not the drive.. Are you saying that even though I still have 2 spares left in my array if one of the disk fails in the Volume(Install) that is in degraded mode that the volume will fail or be unavailable....
The Volume name is called Install... The Volume Install contains two Plexes - install-01 & install-02... Within the Install-01 plex it is broken up between the following disks- disk07-02, disk28-01,disk24-02, disk05-03, disk06-02, disk23-02, disk26-02..... Install-02 Plex is only using disk08-2....
Within the gui interface with volume manager version 2.4 the only thing that stands out to me with the Volume(install) that is in the utility state - Started Degraded is that in the install-01 PLEX there is a gap between the disk07-02 & disk05-03.... None of the other volumes in my array has that characterics...When I go to right click on that gap space between those two disk that I have mentioned above on the install-01 Plex the following dialog box pops up "Stripe Gap Space Form"... Not exactly sure what this is...
AAlso the only other thing that stands out in regard to the actual drives is that within the gui interface on DISK26 it also has a gap on the gui icon of this disk.... When I click on it, a dialog box called "FREE Space Form " pops up...

Well- I'm not to sure if this helps you out anymore in trying to correct my issue... All I know is that I defintly do not have any Failed disk that this degraded volume uses... I guess I could always blow away this volume and recreate it somehow.... Didn't really want to do this...

Thanks