RAID 5 Help Please?!

[Phil_47]

We have an LH3 Netserver with a RAID 5 config. We have 3 9GB drives setup as an array with the 4th drive for a hotspare. We also have a single 9GB drive that is it's own array (or logical drive) that we are not using. All has been great until today. We noticed that one of the drives failed and the hotspare did not kick in.
We would like to do the followng:

1. Remove the failed drive
2. Remove the other drive that is it's own logical drive.
3. Remove the hotspare that did not work.
4. Add the drive we remove in step 2 to the array.
5. Add another new drive that we have to the array to make it a hotspare.

We are very uncomfortable working with this as losing this data would be a fate worse than death for us. What is the best/safest way for us to do all this without losing all our data?
Thanks very much for any help.

Phil

[Greg Carlson]

Phil,

I hope that you have called into a support center since this site was down for a couple of days after the Slammer visited. If not, what you need to do is give us the information of your array.

Post your physical hdd config and LD config.
Ch 0
ID 0 online a0-0 errors and product revision
ID 1 failed a0-1 4media D84D (ect)
Ect..
LD 0
Raid-
size=
ect.

then we can help you.. If you have only 1 failed hdd you should be up and running still.

Ciao,
Greg

[e4services]

Phil,
Knowledge is power which leads to comfort. If you do have it, pick up the NetRAID Series User Guide.pdf where you can learn about the steps to maintain your RAID.

As per the above response, if you are up, then you only have a single drive failure. In the Array Manager you should be able to identify the failed drive. You should also be able to delete the single drive RAID 0. Once deleted you can remove it, remove the failed drive and replace it with the old hot swap and rebuild the array.

Of course it is alway recommended backing up your data. Use an online backup service if you do not have a device.