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April 2nd, 2020 12:00
PowerEdge 2950 Perc 5/i Failed Raid array
I was about to try the suggestion in this post, but I thought I better ask first so things don't get worse, if possible....
I have a Dell2950 I was putting back into service for some lightweight duties. During initial setup I tested the bad bay trying to get it working (machine came from dusty environment). Since I would have plenty of storage space for it's intended application, I just created a 5 drive, RAID5 array. A week after installing Linux and several KVM machines, one of the 5 drives started to flash as bad. I pulled and re-inserted and it worked for a day. I shut it down so I wouldn't loose my work to this point. This was all before Christmas.
I received some replacement HDs last week, so today I decided to power it up and swap out the problem drive. Unfortunately, I didn't make a note which drive was the issue and sort of lost track of it. I knew it was one of two drives. I know I could/should have did the blink LED thing to see what drives were online, but that is now hind-sight.
The controller said the array was degraded, but none of the drives flashed with an error. I powered back down and unplugged one of the two drives I thought was the issue. I powered up and went directly into the RAID controller settings, so that nothing would attempt to write to the array in case that was the wrong drive, or so I thought. Well, it was the wrong drive. I powered back down and replaced the drive I just removed. Now the array is unreadable because it's only reporting 3 of 5 RAID5 drives. Why for the love of God would the machine write something to an array that it knows is incomplete? Is there a way to recover at this point?
DELL-Josh Cr
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April 2nd, 2020 16:00
Hi,
If you go to the physical disk properties page what states are the drives in? If it is foreign you may be able to import the foreign config.
Tim_timweb
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April 3rd, 2020 06:00
Hi Josh,
Thank you for the reply. I now show 3 drives normally, and 2 are listed as missing. The first thing I looked for was foreign config, but it's not an option. I do have another 2950 that is currently running that I can shutdown and install these drives if you think that a different machine may import the drive.
Tim
DELL-Josh Cr
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April 3rd, 2020 10:00
You could try that, you would have to move all of the drives.
Tim_timweb
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April 3rd, 2020 11:00
Instead of fiddling with a running machine, I removed all drives from the machine in question, powered up, then reset the config. I then rebooted and inserted the drives. The same 3 drives detect after loading the foreign config, but the other two still just say missing. I might try doing a few more Google searches, but I really am fed up with it for this week. I might just scrap it and reinstall Linux and all the VMs again next week. I'm really disgusted that this could have happened. If this is by design and not some other issue with the machine, it seems like poor choice to write to drive(s) when the array appears to be missing more drives than it can cope with.