We have a MD3220 (with an expansion shelf MD1220) that have all it's 24 slots full, with 4 Virtual disks setup in RAID 5. We had two hot spares on the array on slot 10 and 15.

We had first a disk tagged as Failed on slot 16 and two VirtualDisks became degraded. The Hot Spare on slot 15 kicked in, but the rebuild failed. As we had more extra spares, we then choose from the Array management utility to make 15 replace the 16 physical disk and removed the failed 16. 
The rebuild on 15 still failed we inserted a new disk on slot 16 which was set as Hot Spare, it also tried to rebuild and failed again.

After that we got a failure also of disk on slot 14, and then 2 of 4 Virtual disks become to failed state.

We turned off the servers and storage arrays for inspecting. We managed to do a full clone with `ddrescue` of the failed disk on slot 14 to another extra spare. In principle we only have a single bad sector (512 bytes) somewhere not near end or beginning of the disk.

After turning on again the arrays and servers with the new clone on slot 14 it won't recognize it, the disk is Unnasigned. We guess due to different serial nr. disk UUID.
We tried to tell the RAID controller to treat the new clone as the old disk, we converged to this command but fails:

# /opt/dell/mdstoragesoftware/mdstoragemanager/client/SMcli -n MD3220-HPS -S -c 'recover virtualDisk physicalDisks=(0,19 0,11 0,12 0,13 0,14 0,9 0,15 0,17 0,18 0,22 0,20) newDiskGroup="10" userLabel="2" virtualDiskWWN="6d4ae52000a5ff6f000003bb506415fe" capacity=1610612736000 offset=0 raidLevel=5 segmentSize=256 dssPreAllocate=TRUE SSID=2 owner=1 ;'

Could not recover a virtual disk using the Recover Virtual Disk command at line 1.
Error 4 - The operation cannot complete because of an incorrect parameter in the command sent to the RAID controller module.

Please retry the operation. If this message persists, contact your Technical Support Representative.
The command at line 1 that caused the error is:

recover virtualDisk physicalDisks=(0,19 0,11 0,12 0,13 0,14 0,9 0,15 0,17 0,18 0,22 0,20) newDiskGroup="10" userLabel="2" virtualDiskWWN="6d4ae52000a5ff6f000003bb506415fe" capacity=1610612736000 offset=0 raidLevel=5 segmentSize=256 dssPreAllocate=TRUE SSID=2 owner=1 ;

Script execution halted due to error.

SMcli failed.

We also got the 'recovery profile'. This has all disks description in it. In theory we could also adjust this to replace the failed disk 14 with the new clone 14 but we can't find any documentation if this is possible.

We have two questions:

1. Do we have a possibility to force this kind of import to the controller ?

2. After the inspection when we turned off, we noticed also that the initially disk 16 tagged as Failed was in good state. Putting it back on the Array on slot 16 is now shown also as Optimal but Unnasigned (as we set Replace physical disk to 15 before taking it out). So we have again on 16 the same disk originally tagged as Failed that now is Optimal. Can we somehow revert the operation of "Replace physical disk from 15 to 16", but without triggering any data rewrite on 16 ? With the hope of the controller seeing the data on the disk and getting the VirtualDisks back.

Thanks in advance for any useful input.