We had one of our drives go bad in our RAID 5 setup with PERC S100. The current config is 4x 1TB Seagate Drives. During the post, I CTRL R to get into admin. I noticed that it showed the status degraded array with 0:2 drive was offline but the other drives were showing online. So, I purchased 2 new drives (1 for replacement and another for future). So, I powered down, removed the bad drive, put the new drive in, and powered up. When I powered up, did CTRL R to go into admin again. It was showing a new array with that drive as NON-RAID. I could not delete the array or anything. So, from what I read from online information, I was told that I would need to add this drive to the array via OMSA.

So, I downloaded that and installed it. Go into OMSA and deleted the new array. Then it would allow me to add my new drive as a spare. The tasks in OMSA really did not give me any other option but that. So, I assumed that this was what I needed to do.

So, after I added as a spare, it went through the rebuilding process which took over 26hrs to do. WOW!

After the rebuild, OMSA is now stating that drive 0:1 is degraded with failure predicted. So, it seems that besides one failing, another one is about to fail. But, before I replace that drive, I have some concerns here which is below.

I booted our server, did CTRL R to view the admin, which I noticed that this first replacement drive 0:2 status is set as SPARE and the other drives have the status ONLINE.

My question here is this: Since I replaced a faulty drive within the array, shouldn't that new drive be part of the set?? In other words, shouldn't that new drive shows status as online since it replaced the faulty drive??

Before I shut down and replace the faulty drive 0:1, I want to make sure I am doing this process correctly for replacement drives within our array.

Any advice on the proper steps on how to get all our drives to be part of the set would be appreciated.

Regards

Joey