Scan disks on IBM ServeRAID 6 controller

[Cody Lo]

We have a server running Windows2000 using ServeRAID 6i, the server was
suddenly not responding and we can see there is a led on one of the
disk keep lite when the server was not responding, the console was
nothing to see and we have to hard reboot the server.

We suspect the disk was somehow having problem but the logical drive is
running without problem after reboot (It's a raid5 logical drive), we
do have a hot spare and would like to swap it with the one we suspect
it is having problem. But before doing this, we want to scan the
hotspare disk to make sure it is good. We cannot find a way to scan the
disk which is on the raid controller in the IBM ServeRAID manager, is
there any way to do this ?

Any hints will be appreciated!

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

I would suggest that you backup and just resync the RAID5. If there
really is a problem with a drive (which I doubt) that should turn it up.
If the problem doesn't recur I wouldn't worry about it - the risks of
replacing a drive on a RAID5 array when you don't need to outweigh the
other probabilities here IMO.

The symptom you observed is pretty common with a server hang, or
any IDE workstation for that matter. It doesn't necessarily mean there
is anything wrong with that particular disk. You can look in the system
event log and serveraid log to see if there is anything there. You should also
check all the connectors (power and data) to the backplane/drives since
this is usually the source of most problems. Also check fans and cooling.

You would have to pull the drive, put it on a regular SCSI controller
and run the manufacturer's DFT to "scan" it in any meaningful way.

Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.