Replacing Hard Drive in RAID 1

Question

Hello,

Currently my company has Dell PowerEdge 2850 with RAID 1 which I noitced a blinking orange light is for HD in slot #1. I checked the Server and found that the status for that hard drive as 'degraded'. I went ahead and purchased a new hard drive to replace the drive in slot#1.

What are the steps I need to perform the replace the degraded hard drive in RAID 1 settings? Do I just shut down the server, remove bad hard drive, place new hard drive in slot, and power the server on for the raid to rebuild on the new hard drive. OR I need to perform other tasks? I appreciate any help on this issue.

Thanks,

m

DELL-Daniel H · Accepted Answer

With a PERC 4 in a PE 2850, best practice is: backup data, and verify backup reboot server, and select Ctrl+M when prompted (you will have a 5 second window) Select 'Objects' on the left, then 'Physical Drive' go down to HDD 1, press enter Select 'Force Offline', and confirm If cabled HDD: power down the server and remove HDD 1 -or- If Hot-swap HDD: remove HDD 1 while the server is running (or you can power it down) wait 30+ seconds (to ensure that the PERC 'sees' that the hard drive is removed) Insert new HDD 1 reboot / power up server, and select Ctrl+M when prompted Select 'Objects' on the left, then 'Physical Drive' go down to HDD 1, press enter Select 'Make HotSpare', confirm 'Yes' The hard drive will start to rebuild. If the hard drive is in a rebuild state, setting it as 'Make HotSpare' is not needed You can reboot and go into the OS, the rebuild will continue in the background

peterjk31 · Answer

The first thing to do is to make sure you have a backup of the data.......

Once the data has been backed up then adding the drive should be fine. Presuming you have a PERC 4 integrated controller, you will have to format the new drive & rebuild the new hard drive. The mirror should then be back online instead of degraded.

Hope this helps

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

Replacing Hard Drive in RAID 1

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