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I have a Power Vault MD 1000 which includes a RAID 5 array (I inherited it), open manage server administrator reports the structure as RAID 5. Today one of the three disks failed.

I would have expected it to become "Degraded". But I got failed virtual disk. And, on omsa, I only have the options "Delete..." , "Blink" , "Unblink". I googled up and down, left and right and I could not find no page explaining in what circumstances one physical drive causes full virtual drive to fail. All pages said it requires two. Beside those three drives I have a fourth one that is "foreign". Here's what I did so far :

  • removed the faulty drive (orange led)
  • borrowed a working drive from another machine and inserted it
  • System reported both foreign drives, but virtual disk remained "failed".
  • I cleaned foreign and both drives become ready (the other two that belong to vdisk are online), again v disk continued failed.

I removed the "new" drive and inserted the old one, I was expecting the old drive to become "failed" as before, but it became "foreign" rather. But the main problem remains, the v drive continues "failed", not degraded. Is there someway to rebuild it? I have backups of most but not of everything, unfortunately.

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  • The MD1000 doesn't have a raid controller
    – Jacob Evans
    Nov 13, 2015 at 4:28
  • hi, Jacob, in my case omreport reports PERC 6/E, is this other kind of controller ?
    – Carlos Botelho
    Nov 17, 2015 at 20:35

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I Carlos, stressful situation....and probably needs a deep investigation it's no easy by mail. But I don't understand the status of your RAID right now, so If I remember right, in a case on my customer you need to import the "foreign" disk on VDISK then when the action is successful, everything will be restored. (crossfinger) I hope that it helps. :-)

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  • Francesco, thanks for your help. the status of my 4 pdisks are 0 - OK/Ready , 1-OK/Foreign (with failure predicted) , 2-Online , 3 - online and this state translates (no idea how, Im lost here) on a vdisk that is critical / Failed. I exported the logs from the controller (PERC 6/E in my case) greped for bad,error,nothing came up. Your competent advise much appreciated
    – Carlos Botelho
    Nov 17, 2015 at 20:29
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Answering my own question, it seems that when we have a foreign drive, one cannot do nothing until that foreign drive issue is addressed. I tried to apply the action importrecoverforeignconfig to the controller, and after a while the vdisk transitioned from failed to degraded : omconfig storage controller action=importrecoverforeignconfig controller=1

After a reboot, disk mounted OK.

interesting read from dell site, though the original problem is not exactly the same : http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2008-September/037379.html

Best, Carlos

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