RAID help

Sp00n · 3 Apr 2009 at 15:58

I am in need of some advice, I have a poweredge 2800 with a perc 4 raid controller.

One single logical drive with 3 partitions across 5 discs (one completely died and pulled out), 4 discs remain, 3 of which are "degraded" but the server is still accessible but it will blue screen if you try and access the c: drive too much.

My dilemma is as such, Can i swap the drives out one at a time to get the controller to rebuild the array itself or do I cut my loses, backup data (been doing that all day anyway) and rebuild with a fresh array and new discs?

Sp00n · 3 Apr 2009 at 16:05

Im not concerned about the degrade in performance, the company has been offline pretty much most of the week as this job has only just been handed to me this morning.

I need to be absolutely certain it will work because I could potentially lose a lot of time on this which is why I have been swaying towards the rebuild as I know for sure that will work but is a much bigger job than rebuilding the whole server.

Do i do the drives one at a time as surely with RAID 5 the data is split across them all and if i remove 3 of the 4 it will just fall over won't it?

Sp00n · 3 Apr 2009 at 17:08

Lol iaind, thats a very confusing statement.

Do you mean "you cant do that if something goes wrong during a reinstall" ?

I'm gonna try and rebuild the array with the replacement discs first thing tomorrow and if it fails I shall start from scratch, Just seems really weird that a raid 5 can stay alive on 1 failed, 3 degraded and one ok.

oh... and for the record, I didn't build the server to start with lol.

ooo, one other thing, dell replaced one of the 146's with a 300, am I right in thinking the perc will just use 146gb of the 300 drive and ignore the rest?

Sp00n · 4 Apr 2009 at 09:34

0:0 - degraded
0:1 - fine
0:2 - degraded
0:3 - degraded
0:4 - dead (removed)

0:0 keeps dropping off the array if you try and access the c: drive too much, I'm going to see if i can true image it as that would save me SO much trouble.

I think 0:4 was setup to be the hotspare or something.

Sp00n · 4 Apr 2009 at 10:31

Stupid thing just won't rebuild, not supprising when 4 out of 5 discs are dead or dying

Trying a true image before I cut my losses but I'm not holding out.

/edit drive just drops offline and the image fails, bugger.

Sp00n · 4 Apr 2009 at 12:31

Because an array rebuild was the easier option had it worked.

thanks for the help anyways.

/edit I couldnt "go back to the way it was" because i will be using the good drive from the current array to build the new one.

Sp00n · 5 Apr 2009 at 15:00

I tried to rebuild the array many times, openmanager stated 0:0 0:2 0:3 were degraded, it sai something like "pre-empt fail" in the logs somewhere.

0:1 wasn't the OS on its own as it was a RAID 5 spanned across all the discs, its just very perculiar how it was kind of working but not really.

Since then I have backed up everything, installed new discs and now I'm rebuilding a new sbs install, company isn't "that" big and its just not worth my time faffing trying to re-create the domain again.