On 10/13/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
That is, I am running firmware version 813G. [According to the LSILogic website, it was released on 2005.03.11, and is now 5 versions old.]
I've got a spare with 813G, and my production one is 813J, fixed a few little issues. Do you have a BBU on that card? Without a BBU, and with the card's cache set to WriteThru, trying to set a hot spare with bioctl would lock up my controller, requiring a hard power cycle and the entertaining fsck of large filesystems. ami0 at pci4 dev 14 function 0 "Symbios Logic MegaRAID SATA 4x/8x" rev 0x07: irq 5 LSI 3008 32b ami0: FW 813J, BIOS vH430, 128MB RAM
Problem summary (problems with bioctl -H on a SATA 300-8x) =============== To summarize (I've included the full test case below) - I can now use bioctl -H to set an "Unused" drive to "Hot spare". However, despite showing as hot spare in *both* bioctl and the LSI boot menu, when I fail a drive in my RAID array, the "hot spare" fails to behave as such (it will not be integrated into the degraded RAID array). It gets worse - once a drive has been set as a hot spare through bioctl, it can never be changed back to unused, nor can it be properly set as a hotspare through the LSI boot menu. Essentially that slot is now unusable. The only solution that I have found is to "Clear configuration" from the LSI boot menu (which then requires reinstall of the contents of the drives).
That sounds bad. I'm going to try and replicate that with my spare stuff next week as I certainly don't want to be bit by that problem on my production hardware. One other question, when you say you replace the manually failed drive, are you using an absolute virgin disk? I seem to recall that the card might "remember" the disk as a previously failed drive (based on finding a previous config on the disk) and be reluctant to believe it's a good disk. Oh, thanks for the extremely detailed report. It'll certainly help me try and replicate your results. -- Jon
