RAID 1 array degraded; no option to rebuild

The only way to get the drive back into the array is select assign hot spare, if this screen lists the disk you disconnected then set it as hot spare and reboot. It will start to rebuild from the other disk.

Thanks for your suggestion, and sorry for the late response.  Unfortunately, when I go to assign a hot spare to the array, OpenManage says, "There are currently no disks that are available, large enough, or of the correct type to be used as a hot spare for this virtual disk."

The degraded drive is still in the system, and it's visible under the "physical disks" menu.  Is there any other way to restore redundancy?  I'm shocked at how complicated this is for a server.  Even Intel's fake RAID for desktops is easier and can rebuild without ever having to restart.

Sounds like you will have to offline the disk, then online it then set it as hot spare. In open manage, go to physical view and select disk 0. In 'available tasks' select offline and apply. Wait for this to complete. In the same menu select online. The disk state sholud change to ready. Now you should be able to select it as a hot spare.

The normal caveats apply, make sure you have a good backup before trying this.

Under tasks for the physical disk, there are actually no options available at all.  Even my third internal disk (which is just a backup storage drive, not part of any RAID volume) has no tasks available.

http://i.imgur.com/FitIg.png

OK, time to down and dirty :-). Make sure you have a backup...

Power down and disconnect drive 0 and power on. Press F2 to enter setup, this is just to stop the server booting into the OS. The raid contoller will register the missing disk. You can press Ctrl-R and confirm this in the raid bios. Once past the raid controller and into the system bios, power down and re-connect disk 0. Power on and either enter Ctrl-r or boot to the o and use open manage. Disk 0 should be listed as online and ready to set as a hot spare.

Next step is to swap the cables on the disks, make disk 1 disk 0 and disk 0 disk 1. Then power on. The controller supports drive roaming so will pick up the new disk 0 as a boot device and should make disk 1 available to set as the spare. I have done this before on other controllers when they've been stubborn.

You could also remove the disk and put it in a desktop and use diskpart to clean it, removing all the config info. Then put he disk back in the server.

The S100 is basically a software raid solution. The firmware is on the chipset and the raid stack is in the software. Like the earlier SAS cards. These are the less expensive options for raid and while they offer the functionality they don't have the dedicated hardware. You sometimes have to coax them to see replacement disks.

Swapping cables with your disks probably didn't work because of the drive roaming and the controller just picked up the id info from the disks. Using diskpart and cleaning the info removes any raid info, so the controller treats it as a disk allowing you to set as the spare.

I have had to do this many times on customer sites and it's still a bit nervy doing it. Glad it worked in the end.

any option that I try to run displays the error message

What are you trying to do and what error message are you getting?

[ADMIN NOTE:  Profanity removed per TOU]  This is so much more complex than it should be.  I have just gone through this fiasco myself and  would have had a coronary with this process should I have not had solid backups in place.  Someone really needs to get their kicked for designing such a poor excuse for RAID volume management.  This is completely worthless!  There is my rant.  If you own an S100, we have MANY, you had better be prepared to monkey around with sensitive drives and connect them to other machines if you want to rebuild an array.  This should have never made it into a PowerEdge Server.  NEVER.

Also, Make sure that you delete the 'NonRAID' Array (Virtual Disk 2 in my case) and not the RAID Array(Containing your OS and data)

Thanks for posting this. I ran into this last night after upgrading a T310 to Server 2012 R2 Essentials. I was not able to assign a hot spare and rebuild the array using the bios ctrl r and diskpart clean. I had to install Dell OpenManage Server Administrator Managed Node(windows - 64 bit) and after hooking drive externally to another computer and running diskpart list disk, select disk 2(in my case***), clean, I was also able to assign hot spare by clicking the name of the virtual drive "none" in my case and then selecting the disk action hot spare. Also, openmanage after installing it opens a web page with a login up top, I had to click cancel on that one and then on the black login screen I used my server creds to login.

KOMBAT_WOMBAT - Thanks for persevering with all the details, had exactly the same scenario and your write-up has brought me to the same solution and conclusion!

Our PowerEdge R210 using PERC S100 RAID 1 is now rebuilding the virtual disk! :emotion-2:

Must agree with the headaches had during the process - not as intuitive as one would expect. The RAID utility at boot (CTRL+r) didn't help after doing DiskPart.exe (on the replacement drive) - as after removing the Non-Raid volume it automatically put my (replacement) disk into Online state and the hot-spare option became greyed-out thereafter. I then had to boot into the OS and use the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) tool as you described.

Nevertheless, 2 full days (of fiddling) later and its finally rebuilding! 

Companion, I am trying to perform the process you suggest but it throws me an error when 
removing the virtual disk (Error: To exit multi-selection menu without selections, you must use), 
please help, I need to recover the file server.