Dell RAID Perc 5/i

[James McDonald]

David A. Bandel wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Anyone familiar with this beast?  It's giving me a hard time.
>
> We wanted to put in a bigger disk, so shut it down and swapped out an
> old disk with a new one.
>
> Says disk is foreign and array is degraded.  Nothing we did gave us
> any better, all operations attempted on the disk failed, although the
> disk is "seen".
>   
David,

I did this a few days ago on a Dell PowerEdge 750.

In my case I was expecting it to start the rebuild as soon as I rebooted 
the server but it (the status) remained in a degraded state. I had to 
trigger the rebuild manually. It doesn't give you confidence when it's 
not saying it's seeing a nice new disk.

So from memory:

You put the new disk (make sure you have the correct scsi ID set for the 
disk using the jumpers)  in and reboot into the Perc Utility (CTRL + M).
Objects ==> Physical Disk
Select the rebuild disk option
(navigate around till you find the rebuild rate and bump it up to 100%)
My 136 GB disk took about 2 or so hours
While it rebuilt it said something like RBLD when it finished it went to 
ONLN

This is all done before you get back to the OS. You could of course 
reboot to the OS after kicking the rebuild off.

Bit weird that the controller failed to see the 'new' disk I had pink 
kittens thinking I had received a bodgy disk till I read the how to 
rebuild the array docs... for the card.

> Put the old disk back in.  Ditto -- disk is foreign, and doing what
> the manual tells us to do gives us nothing.  Everything fails for both
> disks.  Can't add the disk back in, can't add the new disk, and
> believe it or not, although this is part of a RAID 5 array (one of 4
> disks), we can't even boot.
>
> WTFO?
>
> Any ideas welcome.
>
> David A. Bandel
>