Rebuilding Array onto Online Spare

[Ayman Altounji]

I have a client that had a failed hot plug drive on a ProLiant ML350 server that was part of a RAID5 array and was told by Compaq Support to remove the failed drive from the server to read out the part number before putting it back in the server. This reset the "failed" indicator on the drive.

When I went on-site and looked at the server, I was able to rebuild the contents of the failed drive by selecting "Automatic Recovery" upon boot and the drive appears to have healed itself for now. My two questions are: -

(1) Why didn't the system automatically recover the contents of the failed drive onto the online spare?

(2) When the replacement drive arrives from Compaq, how would I go about replacing the faulty drive that no longer thinks that it's faulty without destroying the array?

I've found practically nothing to document this on compaq.co.uk or compaq.com. Could someone also please point me to the correct documentation?

Many thanks in advance.

P.S. This thread has been moved from Disk to ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL). - HP Forum Moderator