> As mentioned before, I have a new server with the LSI MegaRaid > SATA150-4 card. All works nicely at the moment, bar a slight problem > with hot-spares. > > We configured a RAID-5 array with three 250Gb drives and one hot > spare. We simulated a failure by yanking the cable out from drive 2, > and the alarm went off, bioctl allowed us to silence it, and showed > that the array was rebuilding, onto disk 3. The rebuild process took > about 9 hours (64bit card in a 32bit slot). We put the drive back > in, and bioctl showed the drive as Unused. So we try to promote that > drive back to a hot spare, but the bioctl command: > > # bioctl -H 0:2.0 ami0 > > Seems to return nothing, nor does it make the change. We tried > rebooting, but there's no change, and the command still does the > same. When we boot into the MegaRaid config utility on the card's > BIOS, it shows the drive as a hot spare, whereas bioctl still reports > it as unused.
Right. The card honours your request for the device to be a hot spare, but something was busted in reporting the new hot spare. Apparently this bug is now fixed: revision 1.156 date: 2006/05/12 20:51:25; author: marco; state: Exp; lines: +14 -22 Fix a misreporting bug after bioctl -H is used to create a hotspare. This was reported by several people. What happens is that the firmware sometimes misreports what SCSI type a device is. The driver was only allowing a create hotspare function when the type was set to hard disk. Since the firmware will, obviously, not allow the driver to create a hotspare on any other type of device the driver doesn't need these smarts and now will ignore the type. Tested by henning todd and Ben Lovett. ok dlg
