Amber color on my disk?

[Jefferson_6]

hi guys,
i found some amber color on one my disk. They are configured as RAID5, the 2 other disk have a green light but with the other card it has an amber color. I tried rebooting the system but the nothing happens.Is it a busted disk that i need to replace ?

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Yes it is probably a warning that the disk is bad and your raid set is likely running in 'reduced' mode.

It could be a 'locator' LED, but I doubt it.
If so, the 'other' system manager would know, and your are the only system manager no?

You should have management software active which should have warned you about this when it happened without needing the visual clue, but myself I like the visual as an extra hint.

What raid is this software?
Host adapter based like KZPSC (likely)
Scsi (fibre?) controller based like HSZ, HSG or EVA (probably not)?

Probably irrelevant, but still interesting questions:
What OS / version? (Tru64 as implied)
What system?

Do you have Management software for the raid device? Online like HSZterm or Standalone like 'RCU'? You should use it to view detailed status and replace instructions.

Btw... is this truly a 3 member RAID-5?
Personally I find those a terrible idea.
You have the performance cost of raid-5 with hardly any extra space savings.
I am a firm believer in raid 0+1 for 3 member sets if the controller knows how to do those.

Good luck,
Hein.

[Jefferson_6]

Our sysadmin just left and im more on the network side and still studying more of these.I have 6 disk , the first 3 are configured for /usr and the other 3 are configured for /, /root, /var. What software can i use ? I believe its not a good idea to turn off the whole disk,right ? If my investigation leads me to a bad disk then i have to enroll for a support for these one.What steps can you suggest for me to check it? thanks a lot.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Drop your screwdriver,
Slowly step away from the box,
Request help.

:-)

Seriously, it appears that your are currently not equipped to deal with this problem. You either need to learn really fast, reading up a bunch on the details of the system and its components or get someone to help you with that.

That amber light may mean that you are one glitch away from loosing all your data. Is that an acceptable situation?

>> I have 6 disk , the first 3 are configured for /usr and the other 3 are configured for /, /root, /var.

Odd, very odd config, but configured where and how is much more important at this point than what they happend to be used for.
What physical box is this? what interface?

>> What software can i use ?

The software that is provided with the storage controller hardware. This is probaly not a Unix task, but i t possibly is. More likely it require a firmware like operation, or a connection to the controller.

>> I believe its not a good idea to turn off the whole disk,right ?

'Turn off' ? As in 'yank out' ? There is no switch on your disk is there now?
Anyway, Probaly not a good idea untill some software can tell you what the status is.

>> If my investigation leads me to a bad disk then i have to enroll for a support for these one.

Nah, toss it and buy a new one. If you are lucky, and you have a smart controller (like a smart-array) it will automatigically configure a fresh disk as a replacement.. but I don't expect that.
You will probably need to issue explicit instructions through the controller management software

>> What steps can you suggest for me to check it?

Request onsite consulting / learning.
Have somene bring you up to speed in a hurry using this challenge as a 'hands on' training. Get the old resource back for 4 hours if you can.

Find out what hardware you have, hit the web (google: +site:hp.com) for documenation.

Good luck,

Hein.

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi,

you are giving us little information.
We can not even be sure if we are dealing with a Alpha server.
Could you give us the model and os version?

As Hein said,

yell at HP for help!

Michael