[SOLVED] Raid 5 - Intel Rapid

[Lilac7]

I had a power problem with my WServer 2012 R2 which I think I have solved. All the involuntary restarts played havoc on my RAID 5 Array and I lost a disk. It is a 5 disk system with each disk being 3TB. I have never had to rebuild a disk before. So I got a new disk, popped it in, made it a "Spare" and selected the disk to be rebuilt. I also enabled automatic rebuild with hot plug. I just don't know if anything is happening. I know it takes a long time but how can I tell if there is any progress. The new disk is still marked as a "Spare" and is not part of the Array. In the meantime, the failed disk shows up in the IRST window. It shows as part of the Array, but at 0 bytes with an unknown address. I have tried hovering over various items and I cannot tell if the process has started. It's been a couple of hours. I also don't know how to delete the old failed disk. The OS is degraded as well but I figured this will work itself out once the Array comes back into line, and the disk errors can be corrected. Any information and advice is appreciated.

 

[popatim]

It's been a ;ong while since i did any raid beside 0 & 1 on iRST.
You may need to kick it off manually. I'm not sure iRST ever got automatic rebuild going.
open iRST.select rebuild, select rebuild to another drive, select the drive to use, and click rebuild for it to begin.

If you do not have a backup of the array then I would suggest that be the first step. Make a backup and verify you can restore it.
A rebuild would likely take the better part of a week and possibly stress another drive into failure, losing the whole array & all it's data.

Additionally, restoring a backup is faster then rebuilding the array but you take the server off-line doing it.

 

[Lilac7]

It's been a ;ong while since i did any raid beside 0 & 1 on iRST.
You may need to kick it off manually. I'm not sure iRST ever got automatic rebuild going.
open iRST.select rebuild, select rebuild to another drive, select the drive to use, and click rebuild for it to begin.

If you do not have a backup of the array then I would suggest that be the first step. Make a backup and verify you can restore it.
A rebuild would likely take the better part of a week and possibly stress another drive into failure, losing the whole array & all it's data.

Additionally, restoring a backup is faster then rebuilding the array but you take the server off-line doing it.

It turns out I just didn't pay close enough attention. The new drive's size was 99.9999% of the old drive. Hence, it wouldn't rebuild. I should have caught it so it's on me. However, I told Intel that how hard would it be to have a pop up in RST saying it is not going to work because the drive is too small. After all, the RST software is already doing the comparison and saying "no". It's just not letting the operator in on its analysis. They claim my suggestion is being passed along but I can tell you that if they haven't done in the 10+ years or more RST has been out there they aren't going to do it now.