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How do you tell if a HDD in a hardware mirrored RAID has failed?

Im running Windows Server 2003.

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If it's hardware RAID'ed then you need some software to talk to your hardware RAID controller - they all have them but you need to know the manufacturer and model first. Then simply visit their site, go to their download section, pick the software you need, install, reboot and you'll be able to run the software which will tell you how it's getting on.

Let us know the hardware and we'll be able to help if you're stuck.

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Its a HP Server, and i installed all the server utilities off the supplied Disks – Arcath Jan 18 '10 at 12:57
Well in that case you should have a piece of software called the 'HP Array Configuration Utility' under Start, All Programs, HP System Tools. Run that and it'll tell you how your array's getting on, if it's not there get it installed as it's pretty much the only way of telling. – Chopper3 Jan 18 '10 at 13:10
its installed but not working on our server, not gonna fix it the servers replacement is sat in its box next to it atm – Arcath Jan 18 '10 at 13:12
ah, well if you reboot the server there's the ROM-based version of the ACU, look out during POST for something about it - you'll need to press one of the 'F' keys - F8 possibly - that'll tell you the same thing but requires a reboot obviously. – Chopper3 Jan 18 '10 at 13:19
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The HP tools also include a pretty good hardware diagnostics tool that will give you reams of information on all of the server components including raid controllers and drives.

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If you know that a drive has failed but you are not sure which - i.e. if the software monitoring your hardware RAID finds a problem with "drive 1" but you aren't sure which physical drive this refers to - run an I/O operation that results in a pile of writes to the array. The failed drive should not see any activity while the OK ones will. Of course this doesn't help if the drives are internal with no activity LED you can see...

Some rack based servers with hot-swap bays are setup such that there is an "OK" or "error" LED on each swappable bay. If your kit is like this (check you docs) then you should be able to see easily which drive (if any) the RAID control considers failed.

Both the above require physical access to look at the server, of course, which may be an issue if your machine is sat in a far-away colo site...

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If you have physical access to your server, once you reboot your system after the BIOS part it will ask you to press a particular key combination to enter the RAID system utility in the raid card(In some of my servers it is a combination of Ctrl + G, it will show you the combination on screen dring boot so no worries). Once you enter there find out from the various options how to check status of each disks. Generally when you enter the utility in the first screen itself it will show you the status of disks.

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These errors always show up my server's system event log. What's there?

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