Disk Failure - Rebuild Failure

[LJK_1]

Hi all,

Unfortunately one of the disks in our raid 1 configuration went down yesterday on out ML-310 Gen5 server.

I've just replaced the hard disk and tried to rebuild the drive. Im getting Rebuild failures, apparently the current remaining drive of the current array/logical drive has a bad sector - and then the storage manager is reporting that the new disk is failed - Please see attached picture.

This worries me slightly as the port 0 drive is the only one left of this build - backups are taken every night - but id rather not start from scratch if this drive does indeed fail.

Im worried that what i may have done has affected this outcome and would like someone to confirm this for me - upon switching the unit back on after replacing the defective drive, the server would not boot as it had not found any hard drive to boot from - so I want into the raid config menu and made the remaining data drive bootable - would this have caused a problem? - I wanted to get the server up asap as we can not have much downtime here.

Other than that, if the remaining drive is failing I did indeed buy another spare in the looks to upgrade our capacity - So I can replace the drive with bad sector(s) - My next question is can I ghost the failing drive onto a new one and then try rebuilding with the other new drive? I hope I have made some sense and would appreciate any guidance on this before I start wasting my time!

Thanks in advance

[TTr · Accepted solution]

You din not do anything wrong. Here is what happened as I see it, and I have seen the exact same thing happen before several times.

drive0 had a bad sector somewhere. drive1 failed and you replaced it. The raid controller started rebuilding drive1 by reading drive0 and copying the sector data to drive1. When the rebuild process reached the bad sector of drive0, it stopped because it could not rebuild drive1 at that sector location. Unfortunately when something like this happens, the rebuild process stops. I think this is a weakness or a flaw in the raid controller. It should complete the rebuild process and report the error in the bad sectors. You would only lose the data in the bad sector and have the rest of the disk data available. The OS would report a read error for the missing data.
In some cases there is no data on the bad sectors so there is no loss of data and no OS error. Yet you are left with a failed rebuild process and a degraded raid environment and you can not recover from it. The thing to do now is to backup all the data, replace both drives, recreate the raid configuration and restore the data.
Making the other partition bootable did not cause this. The bad sector in disk0 was there from before and may have been there for long time.

[LJK_1]

Thanks for your reply.

OK so it sounds like ill have some work on my hands then, I'm glad that I have done nothing wrong (I suspected I didn't but never had to make any changes on replacing a disk before).

Ill try ghosting the disk with bad sectors first, as that would save me a great deal of time and give that a go - I hope that bad sectors do not contain data which would be a bonus.

Failing the ghost I will clean install on new drive and restore system data, rebuild array and go from there.

Thank you for your assistance.