Logical Drive Failure

[Peter Olson]

We have a Proliant 5500 with a Smart Array 3200. The server is setup with 10 - 36.4GB hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration, one logical drive. The server is coming up with a Logical Drive failure because one of the drive is bad (validated by a red light on one of the drives). The error code on the server is 54h 1784.

Why doesn't the RAID 5 kick in and rebuild the drives using the remaining drives???

When we replace the bad drive will the server rebuild itself???

Is all my data lost and why???

Any advice will help.... and yes we have a tape backup of the data, but we use RAID 5 to prevent major recoveries such as this.

Thanks.

Peter Olson
polson@primefs.com

[Igor Karasik]

Peter,
you can replace bad drive and your SmartArray controller will rebuild RAID automatically.
Most likely you don't define spare drive in your RAID-5 array, otherwise rebuilding must start automatically once one of the drives failed.

[Terry Hutchings · Accepted solution]

That shouldn't be happening. There must be a reason why you have a logical drive failure. In a raid 5 this would be caused by two or more drives failed. A raid 0 would have a logical drive failure if one drive failed.

If you had a logical drive failure, then I don't believe you'll get your data back by replacing the bad drive.

[Peter Olson]

Thanks for the positive note. I was under the same impression about losing all my data. This is my first time seeing a Raid 5 logical drive failing with one drive failing. There must be other issues with the logical drive. This is what backups are for. Thanks.

Peter Olson

[Igor Karasik]

Sorry, I didn't understand your question and I am missing "Logical Drive Failure".
It's very uncommon situation when RAID5 failed with one bad disk.
Maybe it is SmartArray controller problem.