RAID Failure

[Keith Woodworth]

On Sat, 13 Aug 2005, Chris Buechler wrote:

|->yeah you should be able to hot swap the drive with a replacement.  Not
|->sure how it'll work with FreeBSD as I haven't lost drives in any PERC2
|->FreeBSD boxes.
|->
|->There were PERC2's with at least a couple different chipsets.  There
|->may be software RAID utilities available that you can use (like
|->asr-utils as an example).

Ive been looking for RAID utilities to use on a FreeBSD system that will
allow some control over the RAID arrays but have not tried any. I'm not
sure the asr ones will work as this controller is based upon LSILogic
MegaRAID chipset. The drives come up as amr().

|->I've attempted to hot swap a hot-swappable SCSI drive on a non-Dell
|->server running FreeBSD and frozen the server up solid, so I'd
|->definitely be careful.  Not something I'd ever do during peak hours.
|->
|->The absolute safest way with any OS, in my experience, would be to
|->shut it down, swap the drive, power up and get into the RAID
|->controller's BIOS and rebuild from there (don't have to wait for the
|->rebuild to complete successfully), then boot the server back up.
|->Probably only 10 minutes of downtime.

I'm not going to attempt a hot-swap for sure. I'm going to have to turn
the machine off as Ive found with many FBSD machines that after you unplug
a PS/2 keyboard while the machine is running then plug the keyboard back
in a while later the keyboard doesnt work. So I gotta hit the power button
and power cycle the machine...

The hot spare drive is running and took over for the failed drive
perfectly but I'm just not sure whats going to happen on a reboot. I guess
since the hotspare is running the drives should just come up normally?

Thanks,
Keith