Recovering from Hardware Failures

[Ayman Altounji]

My question is not server model # specific. I wanted to know if there was documentation on the Compaq website that specifically tells you how to recover from a broken mirror, 1 drive failure in a RAID 5, 2 or more drive failure in a RAID5, etc. These are all hardware RAID setups.

[Ayman Altounji]

There is nothing you can do if you loose two drives in a RAID5 array. The rules are basically to backup the system as always and if ONE drive fails, don't wait any longer than necessary.

For either situation, if one drive fails, replace it on the fly. The controller (if it's a Compaq array) will start rebuilding the data on the new drive.

There is a way to protect the system from more than one drive failure and that is to setup a "hot-spare" drive. This would be a drive left normally unused in the system. If any drive in the array it is assigned to fails, it will automatically spin up and have data rebuilt on it. When the new drive comes, simply replace the failed drive ONLY (not the spare) and the new drive will start rebuilding. Once the rebuild is done, the hot-spare will return to it's spare status.