Virtual disk problem

[northeast_technician]

Hello, I have a dell server which has not been set up by me. It has 4 drives that has been set up as virtual. One of the disks has died so I replaced it now I can't get the server to boot

 

Any ideas welcome

[edutech4schools]

I would find out if it is under warranty and if it is give Dell a call

[edutech4schools]

and hope its not using RAID5 as that's not great at rebuilding drives

[northeast_technician]

It's not under warranty it's about 4 years old

How will I check the raid configuration

[northeast_technician]

Found it and yeah it's raid5

[bossman]

@northeast_technician

 

What model is the server?

 

Found this: Replace drive and rebuild RAID on Dell PowerEdge 2900

 

http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/182

 

Hope this helps

Edited February 2, 2016 by bossman

[twin--turbo]

and hope its not using RAID5 as that's not great at rebuilding drives

 

 

Have run raid 5 arrays since 1999, lost many a drive but the array has always rebuilt.

 

TT

[Norphy]

and hope its not using RAID5 as that's not great at rebuilding drives

 

Yeah, that's not necessarily correct. RAID 5 is deprecated because of the increasing size of hard drives. As the size of drives increase, the longer it takes for a recovery to happen. The longer a recovery takes, the higher the chances of another unrecoverable read error. That doesn't mean that RAID5 is bad at recovering drives, it just means that it isn't recommended for use with larger drives.

 

As with TT, I've run many a RAID5 array and had failed drives but no failed rebuilds.

[Roberto]

Yeah, that's not necessarily correct. RAID 5 is deprecated because of the increasing size of hard drives. As the size of drives increase, the longer it takes for a recovery to happen. The longer a recovery takes, the higher the chances of another unrecoverable read error. That doesn't mean that RAID5 is bad at recovering drives, it just means that it isn't recommended for use with larger drives.

 

As with TT, I've run many a RAID5 array and had failed drives but no failed rebuilds.

 

Agreed. Used it many a time in the past with very good results, but I'd seriously think twice about using it for any new systems.

[twin--turbo]

Last year we actually had one drive fail every month till October across all sorts of devices.

 

Equalogics

Eon Nas

HP DLxxx

HP P2000

 

TT

[timbo343]

Have run raid 5 arrays since 1999, lost many a drive but the array has always rebuilt.

 

TT

 

Me too, on our physical servers. People used to say have 2 drives as raid 1 and the rest as raid 5, i ignored this advice and always setup my drives in Raid 5 and then partition it off. I've had a few drives fail in a Raid 5 and they have always rebuilt... these were always hp drives and HP servers .

[northeast_technician]

Power edge t410 is the sever model

[bossman]

@northeast_technician

 

Have you another new disk to replace it with?

 

You should just be able to pull the failed drive and replace it live with the new one and it should rebuild from the other drives if you only have one drive failure, if 2 drives have degraded (Failed) then it is another matter and you will probably have to start from scratch and repair from backups.

 

Only had a Raid5 server fail once before and that's exactly what it took to sort it.

 

http://www.dell.com/Support/Article/us/en/04/SLN283148

 

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/569366-disk-failed-on-raid-5-dell-poweredge-t410

 

Good hunting

Edited February 3, 2016 by bossman

[northeast_technician]

Thanks for all your help with this, it doesn't appear to be rebuilding though so I am going to have to look into other options [emoji30]