After booting this morning, PAX complained of bad memory and failing drives on the PowerVault array.
We took out the first four 256MB DIMMs and moved the remaining four into the first slots. The first four came with the system and the remaining four were added some time later. It was happy with the memmory at that point, but the PV drives were still unhappy.
The PERC BIOS claimed that drives 3 and 5 on the PV220S were “different” somehow, and put the container into critical. This was unacceptable, since there were no alert indications on the PowerVault unit itself and two drives out of a RAID-5 system is bad news. Poking at the PERC BIOS didn’t seem to change things. We talked with Dell tech support for quite a while, during which they had us verify the drives from the PERC BIOS. The two “failed” drives were fine, but drive 8 had a couple of bad sectors. We left tech support with the suggestion to upgrade the PERC firmware and see if that made a difference. If not, our only hope was to delete the container, recreate it, and restore from tape.
Upgrading to version 2.7 of the PERC BIOS changed the error. Now it stated that drive 8 (the one with bad sectors) was changed or missing, or somesuch. It allowed us to verify the drive and start a rebuild of the array. The rebuild is currently ongoing and the data is intact.
Update
The PowerVault array finished rebuilding successfully at approximately 7:00 AM Sunday morning.
Posted by Rowan Littell at May 17, 2003 06:22 PM, updated 02:11 PM May 19, 2003