Topic: Drive on hardware RAID failed - have a replacement drive from old win server

[jimdanvers]

Subject kind of says it - I've a current 9.x server running on an old Dell server that my company retired some years ago.  It was going to the recycle pile but I couldn't let that happen so I took it and built my SME box with it -- it's an old Dell Poweredge T610 with the onboard PERC raid controller.  It has four SAS 146gig drives - one of them recently failed.  As they are hot swappable - I pulled the dead one w/out shutting the OS down or anything and just recently aquired a replacement drive (same make / model / size) from a co-worker of mine at another location who also had a couple of old retired servers sitting around.  The drive was part of an array that had a windows server install on it . . . . possibly a dumb question but I'm not sure - so asking you guys:

Am I going to have to go into the bios on my SME box and initialize (wipe) this replacement drive, or should I just be able to slap it back into the server and let the raid cfg that SME used on the initial build / install do it's thing - ie; will it be 'intelligent' enough to just format and populate the drive with parity as it needs to?

I (honestly) don't know how SME raids drives - I think it mirrors yes?  ( RAID 1 )  I'm not sure what it does if / when it detects an onboard hardware controller with multiple drives like I have on this machine - 4 drives - RAID 10? 

Back to the question though - you guys think I should be able to just slap the replacement drive in, or will I in fact need to shut the box down and scratch the drive ( initialize it in the controller interface via the BIOS )?

Thanks . . . .

[Jean-Philippe Pialasse]

Well from your history it seems highly probable that you are using hardware raid with the pecl card and you are not asking the question at the right place as it does not seems to be related to SME softraid.

However those card are popular, and you might have someone able to answer you around.

My feeling is that you will need to either wipe the disk before pluging it or have to reboot to indeed use the card driver to wipe it and add it to the current cluster as it is currently recognised as belonging to another cluster and the least we can expect from the firmware is not to wipe it down automatically.

[krisden]

Hi, you have to enter in the raid controller management interface with "ctrl+C" at the post boot sequence (system will prompt after first sequence) in order to check the added drive status and by the way others drives smart state. Warning, if the utility advise about a "foreign config found", don't import it...
Please, find the documentation here :
https://downloads.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_ser_stor_net/esuprt_poweredge/poweredge-t610_owner%27s%20manual_fr-fr.pdf

If the drive is seen by the perc, then you have to add it manually because it wasn't a part of the original raid (like a hot spare disk for example) and the rebuild will started alone by validate your choice.

Be careful with this hardware, you have to check :

• drives firmware (many seagate drives from this time fail
• bios up to date

Check the doc about idrac, if it is available you will be able to manage all this through a gui.
Othervise, Dell provides many tools to setup the server and also with a Linux system, you can retrieve these informations on their support website with the server service tag 

To ended, it depends about your datas currently stored on hdds :
* hardware raid => sme will see one volume (created with the sas utility)
* sme software raid => you have to destroy the raid matrix to be able to see all hdd "one by one"