RAID5 array didn't rebuild

[Mindaugas]

Hi,
One of our serverâ s hard disks failed. The disk is in the RAID 5 array, array consists of 6 hard disks. After replacement of the drive, array didnâ t rebuild. It starts rebuild and after 1 minute stops (LEDâ s on the replaced hard disk turns off). Then I replaced this hard disk again with other new disk, and array didnâ t rebuild again. I think it is maybe problem with another failed hard disk (possibly SCSI Port 1, Drive ID 2, see attached ADU report). System (Novell 6.5) is working, but had couple of ASRâ s.
Maybe somebody looks at the ADU report and tells what I can do else.

Mindaugas

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi Mindaugas,

Welcome to the ITRC forums.

First things first, make sure that you have a good backup of the system. You may well need it soon...

From going through the ADU report, what appears to be happening is that 3 more of the drives in the array are experiencing timeouts whilst the array is trying to rebuild which is causing it to stop.

Is the system being used heavily ? That might be causing the timeouts...

If you can, try and restart the rebuild without anything happening on the server. That might help things to rebuild.

I seem to recall there being a rebuild priority on the SmartArray controllers. Try setting this to low and see if it helps things to rebuild.

If you're still having problems, you might want to run the Firmware Maintenance CD on your server, as the drive firmware is a little out of date.

If all that fails then you may well be looking at having to use the backup tapes you created earlier... :-(

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob

[e4services]

Our experience with this symptom is that if the rebuild continues to fail, it is the data that is causing the issue. THis could be come from, as stated above, a bad sector on another of the RAID group, or just a mismatch in the data. Since the controller does not do diags as it goes, it is oblivious to the errors and just times out trying and reports nothing but a failure.
From our experience and statements from HP and RAID controller support, the recovery past is as stated above. Take a backup ASAP with the RAID degraded. Thankfully you can still do that. Clear the RAID configurationa nd reconfigure the RAID with the replacement drive.
NOTE: If it was me, I would replace all of the drives if they are approaching 5 years old, with newer larger drives.