Equallogic PS4100 offline member

Question

Hi everyone,

We have an PS4100 (R50) and can´t access to the volume. On the web interface member is offline.

When boot we can find error:

SP:1622570913.61:init.c:727:WARNING:13.3.1:Disk drive 1 has a history of failure.
SP:1622570913.62:init.c:727:WARNING:13.3.1:Disk drive 9 has a history of failure.
IO HISTORY not enabled
SP:1622570913.84:events.c:115:ERROR:14.4.0:0:Inserting bad block entries in RAID LUN 0.

Lost blocks detected in a RAID set.
More spare drives are expected.

As I understand the group is offline because its waiting to replacing disks... is it correct?

Is required to change 2 disk. Can I change them with 2 new ones (dell) with the storage online?

What does it means "More spare drives are expected."

Thank in advance. All help to understand what is happening will be useful. Thanks!

dwilliam62 · Answer

Hello,

Since the member is offline with failed drives it means the RAIDset has faulted beyond it's ability to be available. If you just replace the drives it will not resolve the issue. RAID50 is two RAID5 RAIDsets striped together. Two drives have failed in the same RAIDset bring the entire member offline. There is no way for a rebuild to complete in that case. RAID6 has uses two drives for parity so it can survive even two drives failing. RAID6 is the preferred RAID level especially for large 7200 RPM drives.

The last drive to fail is the critical drive. If that can not either be brought back online or sent to a recovery service to be cloned, you will not be able to get this member back online.

re: More Spares That just means that a failure occurred and a spare drive was used. RAID50 uses two spares. When one is used, it's "expecting that there should be two spares" It's alerting you to replace the failed drive so it can become the new spare.

FYI: You can't just replace failed drives with OEM or any Dell drive. The drives for Equallogic arrays are specific to EQL. They are branded in such a way that they are recognized by the array. Any other drive will show up as 'unsupported' and not be brought online.

You can attempt to reset the drives to see if it will come online long enough to backup your data. Failing that you can send the drives out to be recovered by a 3rd party service and hopefully bring the member back online.

If you have full backups you can reset the array. Find compatible drives to replace the failed drive and the spare and restore your data. I would suggest you change to RAID6 if you do so.

Regards,

Don

dwilliam62 · Answer

Hello,   Sorry. 'reseat' the drives, not 'reset' them.  Sometimes they will come back long enough to recover data. Usually not long enough to complete a rebuild unfortunately.   Regards,  Don

LeandroCM · Answer

Thanks Don!

Now its clear the situation.

"You can attempt to reset the drives to see if it will come online long enough to backup your data."

Pls, how is the procedure to reset de drives?

Thanks again.

EqualLogic

Equallogic PS4100 offline member

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