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E200i RAID 5 Array: Ready for Recovery

 
J. K.
Occasional Advisor

E200i RAID 5 Array: Ready for Recovery

Hi,

Our RAID 5 array (consisting of 4 SATA drives) on an E200i controller is in "Ready for Recovery" state. How can I assign a newly inserted drive to be a hot spare on this array?

The docs make it sound like there should be a Assign Spare option in the ACU in the logical view, but it's not there.

None of the drives are indicating a hard failure. Upon rebooting the server (ML350 G5) I chose the option to rebuild. Eventually the rebuild just seemed to stop, and the array status went back to Ready for Recovery.

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks.
8 REPLIES 8
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: E200i RAID 5 Array: Ready for Recovery

You need to check if there are any failed drives in the array. If you have ACU/ADU installed, check the status of all components (disks, arrays, LUNs) and run an ADU report and check for errors.
J. K.
Occasional Advisor

Re: E200i RAID 5 Array: Ready for Recovery

I've attached the ADU report if anyone would be willing to take a look.

The status alert for the controller says:

Code 776: (Ready for Recovery) Logical Drive 1 (1.4 TB, RAID 5) is queued for rebuilding.

Choosing "More Information" on the array shows
- the same Ready for Recovery message
- 4 physical drives (with no message)
- Spare drives: none
- failed drives: none

There is no option to add the fifth drive in the bay as a hot spare, nor is there an option to rebuild the array.
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: E200i RAID 5 Array: Ready for Recovery

Was a drive replaced recently?
I am not sure but this is in the ADU report.
====================
Big Replacement Drive Map 0x08 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00
Position Device Status
-------- --------------------- -------------
3 Physical Drive 1I:1:4 Informational

====================
Is it possible that a drive was replaced recently (or maybe not so recently) and it never rebuilt. It shows as part of the array but the data may have not been written back to it.

You can look at the drives and see if one of them has no activity lights at all specially when the server is writing out to the array.
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: E200i RAID 5 Array: Ready for Recovery

Also from the ADU report:

Position Unit Flags Status
-------- --------------------------------------------- -------------
0 Rebuild Aborted From Read Error Critical
4 Never Accessed Regions Skipped During Rebuild Informational

It looks like when the drive was replaced, there were read errors somewhere in the remaining drives and the replaced drive rebuild was aborted.

It is possible that the spot where the read errors occured had no files on it, so on the OS side there may have been no errors.

Remember that the logical drive in the array is based on data striped across the disks at block level before any file data is on these blocks. So when the array rebuilds a replaced disk does not care if there is data on each block, it has to rebuild each and every block in the logical disk.

As far as I can tell this is what has happened and you should immediately take a backup of all your data and consider rebuilding the array.
J. K.
Occasional Advisor

Re: E200i RAID 5 Array: Ready for Recovery

No drives have ever been replaced. I've been trying to add a hot spare to the because something is clearly not well. When looking at the drives in the bay, the first three blink green in sync, while the fourth one blinks green, but not in sync with the others. Not sure if that's significant at all.

Does "backup and rebuild the array" mean the array must essentially be deleted (meaning all data is lost) and then recreated?

Thanks.
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: E200i RAID 5 Array: Ready for Recovery

That 4th drive looks like is the one that is referenced in the ADU report.

Zoom in with ACU on that drive and see if you get any more info on it.
J. K.
Occasional Advisor

Re: E200i RAID 5 Array: Ready for Recovery

I've zoomed in using the physical drive to the 4th drive, nothing looks bad there. The status says OK.
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: E200i RAID 5 Array: Ready for Recovery

Did you have this server under your responsibility from when it was put in service? That 4th disk could have been replaced long time ago.

In any case, read and understand my comments above regarding data rebuild and read errors. If I were in your position, I would take one or two full backups including OS image copies and would power off the server (unplug) and power on again to see if any of the rebuild or read errors would go away. If not, then I would replace the disk with the disk errors and possibly the 4th disk as well and rebuild the array and restore the OS and data.