autoraid 12H: 'not enough drives'

[Erik Heckers]

Hello!

Removed some disks from an old
Autoraid and want to use it with 10 instead
of 12 disks. Now it get that error message.
I checked all the array* commands but
didn't find a solution (e.g.array formatting didn't help)

Any hints?

Thank You,
Erik.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You should be able to run with only 4 drives so 10 should be no problem.


I would reduce it to 4 drives, remove all Logical Drives and Format the array (using the front panel). Next, add a disk at a time until you reach 10.


Note: You can't format until all the Logical Drives have been deleted.

[Michael Steele_2]

insf -e -or- reboot server.

Check the zoning on the brocade switch.

eliminate the brocade and direct connect.

'armdsp -a (* report all luns *)

armdsp -R (* restart server *)

[Patrick Wallek]

Just an FYI for you Frederic, the AutoRaid 12H is a SCSI attached unit, so zoning and switches and any other Fibre connectivity issues will NOT be an issue here.

[Michael Steele_2]

Thanks!

[Steve Labar]

Your error could be related to loss of data redundancy. Did you remove and LUNs before you removed the disks? The RAID, may think it is still supporting all of the previously configured LUNs with less disk space available. Remove some of you LUNs until required space is at or below available space you have now and see if that helps.

Good Luck.

Steve

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Erik,
you can not remove more than one disk at a time until rebuild will complete. Removing/failing more than one disk will lead disk array to 'data loss' state. Try reformatting it from the front panel. Look to anothers' advices. If nothing will help try removing batteries from both controllers (each controller has 2 batteries) to clear maps, then insert batteries back and try formatting disk array again
Eugeny
PS. It is not a good way how you did. Removing disks one-by-one from 'live' disk array and waiting for rebuild to complete would save your data

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Since he tried formatting, I assumed that he doesn't care about the data. Again, I would reduce this to as small a problem as possible (so that we run less risk of more bad drives) - 4 drives. Remove all logical drives (using front panel) and format (using front panel). I done this many times and it always works. You next add 1 drive at a time and you will probably have to use the 'Include Drive' front-panel command each time.

[Vincent Farrugia]

Hello,

That is a worry, in my opinion.

When you create a LUN in an AutoRAID, ALL the disks are spanned across. So if you suddenly remove 2 disks without letting the AutoRAID to rebuild the data onto th remaining disks, you have data loss, plain simple.

How did you remove the disks? You should have removed ONE disk at a time, each time waiting for the AutoRAID to rebuild its data.

Also, are you sure that your current data could be held in 10 disks? It could be that you ran out of space when trying to rebuild.

I hope you have a good backup.

HTH,
Vince

[Erik Heckers]

Hello!

To clarify things:

I first deleted all LUNS.
(no LUNS= no data?)

I removed one disk (no problem).

The other disks I 'downed' using
arraycfg -D -d -Z

And now I'm stuck ...

Thanks for your help,
I may try the hard way and
removing the batteries.
But I still hope I can do it
via command-line...