Array not rebuilding
tmiller99
Gig drives. At one point in time (before mine) one of the 5 drives
failed and then was replaced. Since then the array has never rebuilt
it's self, you slip in the new drive and it starts to rebuild but then
after a few minutes the drive lights go out and stay out. I have been
round and round with Compaq, even did a few ROMPaqs and still nothing.
We have an identical server so I even tried swapping out cables, cages
and such. The last contact I had with tech support, I provided them
with the inspect info and they said I had another failed drive due to
the high number of hard read errors=111932. How can I have two bad
drives and still have an array ? I loaded cpqonlin and looked around
and found no failed physical drives and current rebuild status was 0%.
One thing that I did note was that one of the drives had ultra scsii
transfers disabled (same drive with the hard read errors) I need to
restore my fault tolerance soon...any suggestions ?
* Sent from Novell Discussion Forums http://novell.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
The fastest and easiest way to search and participate in Usenet - Free!
Paul Meiners
Paul Meiners
Had a similar situation with a AMI 428 controller. Seems the particular controller under certain
circumstances had problems recognizing new replacement drives; the replacement drives would be
considered a failed drive, no matter what was done.
The raid controller failed the original drive and would not reset to allow a new drive to be
recognized because of a "bug" in the firmware or driver
Unless your able to come up with a better solution......
Make 2 full backups of the data, and the server rights. I would do a "bindfix" just before the
backup. As an added precaution I copied the entire server down to a large IDE drive on a workstation.
Copy all needed files from the DOS partition to Zip, floppy or CD. I would also copy \system ,
\public and your backup software directory to a local workstation.
document every setup parameter of the array
update the firmware on the raid card- then try to bring up the array, the array logical drive may
fail completely at this point, so be prepared for a complete rebuild of the server.
If the array does come up after the firmware upgrade, try to to get your new drive to rebuild.
If the array does not come up, or the new drive still is not recognized, a complete array
initialization is called for ( starting from scratch).
Update the software drivers for the raid. Keep the older drivers available. Be prepared to download
updated Novell patches. If you think you need tech support, prepare for contacts before you start.
My array problem happened with a Novell 4.2 server, and it became more involved
I just replaced (upgraded) the drives on a 3.2 server array. Basically do a simple install, down the
server, copy your files to the DOS partition, bring the server up, copy the \system \public and your
backup software from a "logged in" local workstation, bring the server down and up again, restore
from tape with "overwrite" all files enabled. Print queues will have to be established after the
restore.
Paul Meiners