If you have a spare disk I would suggest trying the rebuild on that first. Im always wary of upgrading drivers or firmware while the RAID volume is degraded.
If you are going to do the FW upgrade from a boot floppy/cd you could always pull the disks out before you do the actual upgrade (haven't done this in years) What method did the tech use to describe breaking the RAID-ness? And how would you have two identical sets of data when one set is obviously out of synch with the constant fail/rebuild. Another option I would also try before a FW upgrade would be take the disk that's not rebuilding, put in another slot, initialize it so that it is completely wiped, then put it back in the slot and see if it suffers the same issue. Like I said, I don't like doing FW upgrades when the array is messed up. I am paranoid though. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of david o'donnell Sent: 05 August 2009 23:01 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: R200 SAS 6/iR RAID-1 failing to rebuild Do not see why you have to kill off the RAID-ness before doing the firmware or driver update...! This does not seem correct to me, I would go back and double check that. I just did a firmware upgrade on PERC okay, it is older but I would think the same principles apply. Before you do anything I would get several backups of the data and preferably a few to disk as well. Message: 5 Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 17:22:41 +0100 From: "Faris Raouf" <[email protected]> Subject: R200 SAS 6/iR RAID-1 failing to rebuild To: <[email protected]> Message-ID: <009301ca15e8$f5257870$df7069...@net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hi all, Although this will start a bit OT, I'm going to get on-topic in a bit. A quick look through the logs on one of our R200s has flagged what looks like a failing HD in our RAID-1 mirrored pair: Essentially I'm seeing several entries like this: Aug 1 16:12:13 vzbeta kernel: mptbase: ioc0: RAID STATUS CHANGE for PhysDisk 0 id=1 Aug 1 16:12:13 vzbeta kernel: mptbase: ioc0: PhysDisk is now missing Aug 1 16:12:13 vzbeta kernel: mptbase: ioc0: RAID STATUS CHANGE for PhysDisk 0 id=1 Aug 1 16:12:15 vzbeta kernel: mptbase: ioc0: PhysDisk is now missing, out of sync Aug 1 16:12:19 vzbeta kernel: mptbase: ioc0: RAID STATUS CHANGE for VolumeID 0 Aug 1 16:12:19 vzbeta kernel: mptbase: ioc0: volume is now degraded, enabled Aug 1 16:12:19 vzbeta kernel: mptbase: ioc0: RAID STATUS CHANGE for PhysDisk 0 id=1 Aug 1 16:12:19 vzbeta kernel: mptbase: ioc0: PhysDisk is now online, out of sync Aug 1 16:12:19 vzbeta kernel: mptbase: ioc0: Initiating recovery Aug 1 16:12:19 vzbeta kernel: sd 0:1:0:0: mptscsih: ioc0: completing cmds: fw_channel 0, fw_id 0, sc=ffff810234622500, mf = ffff81023e382b00, idx=6 Having a look in OMSA shows the array rebuilding, then after a few percent complete, starts from 0% again. In other words it looks like it is trying to rebuild, fails, then tries again, over and over. I've just had a chat to a nice Dell support peep and he's asked me to upgrade the firmware on the Perc (I'm one release behind -- not sure how that happened), and upgrade the driver, before we do anything else (e.g. replace the drive). The key step that's worrying me is that before I can upgrade the firmware and driver I apparently need to basically kill off the RAID-ness on the mirrored pair, so I end up with two individual hard disks. Has anyone done this? What I really want to know is will doing this result in total data loss? My thinking is that since these are mirrored pairs I should end up with two ordinary hard disks with identical data on them (even if one probably doesn't work) when I delete the virtual volume. But I'd love to know if this is really what's going to happen. Can anyone advise? Once I've done that I'm happy with doing the firmware update, but not so happy about doing the driver update. This is where we get back on topic. A while ago I think someone posted something about some kind of problem with the latest DKMS? I can't remember the details. Am I imagining things or is there an issue? We use Centos 5.3 on these systems. Any advice will be very much appreciated. Thanks, Faris. _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. Access to this email by anyone else is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended addressee please contact the sender and dispose of this e-mail. Thank you. _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
