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Andrew Hoole's questions

Martin Hope
Andrew Hoole
Asked: 2016-12-06 01:28:29 +0800 CST
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I hope you can help me out of a puzzle. I have a Smart Array P400 controller which has 5 drives configured in RAID 5 and one extra drive as a hot spare. Two of the main drives were showing some signs of failure so I bought two new drives. Now this is the point where I think I went wrong, I added both of the new drives into the array as additional hot spares hoping that I could fail the other drives and get the hot spares prompted into the array. I couldn't see a way to cause this to happen via the ACU interface so I opted to pull out one of the drives which I wanted to replace. The system failed over nicely and brought one of the hot spares online as excepted but it didn't become part of the main array just an active hot spare. This didn't seem a big problem as I thought I would just remove one of the other hot spares from the array config and use it to replace the drive which I had removed. Unfortunately the controller in the present state of having failed over to a hot spare wouldn't let me manage the hot spare config to remove one from the array. I forcibly pulled one of the additional hot spares out from the array and used it to replace the main drive. The system has now rebuilt the main array and the original hot spare has returned to being a non active hot spare. So i am good apart from my array config says I now have a failed hot spare and I can't manage the hot spares until this is resolved.

You might think I could put the drive which was failing back in as the hot spare to resolve the failure and then remove the hot spares via the ACU, unfortunately I'm not sure this will work as it is a slightly smaller drive (750GB as opposed to 1TB).

Is there anyway that I can change the array configuration to remove this failed hot spare which I don't really need.

Sorry for the long ramble about how I got where I am now.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Andrew Hoole

hp-smart-array