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I have a Dell PowerEdge R710 with PERC H700 Integrated BIOS Configuration Utility 2.02-0025.1

I have a raid 5 setup, and recently I noticed one of the hard drives blinking amber/green, which according to this documentation means the HDD was getting near end of life.

I bought a new drive, powered down the machine, and replaced the failing drive. When I powered the machine back on, it recognized that there was a new drive, and booted normally. Now the new drive is steady green, and the rest of the drives are blinking like normal.

My question is, how do I tell if it is currently rebuilding, or if it's waiting for me to do something?

When I went into the PERC H700 Config Utility, the Disk Group, Raid 5, looks normal, but I'm a little worried. Can someone give me some ideas on how I check if this is actually rebuilding? I found an old post that had instructions on how to add it to the Hot spares group first, before it would rebuild, but I've found others saying that it auto rebuilds. Just trying to ease my mind. Thanks,

More Info.

It looks like, to answer my question, it does not automatically rebuild. I needed to mark the drive as the Global Hotspare. However, I noticed one of my drives is already labeled "Rebuilding". I have no idea what to think now. So, the situation is, I have one drive that I just replaced, that is new, and I just labeled it as Hotspare in the below picture. Does the final drive say "Rebuild" because it's rebuilding the Hotspare? Or is something else entirely happening?

enter image description here

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    got openmanage installed?
    – yagmoth555 ♦
    Mar 29, 2017 at 22:45
  • I'm actually not sure. I'm pretty new to server admin on windows machines, and just inherited this environment. So, now I'm going to look up what openmanage is, and how to install/run it on a headless windows hyper-v server.
    – trueCamelType
    Mar 29, 2017 at 22:50
  • I can't seem to get openmanage installed. It keeps saying I don't have permission, which doesn't seem right, since I'm the sysadmin. I'll look into that later. I'm hoping there's another method to just quickly figure this out.
    – trueCamelType
    Mar 30, 2017 at 0:02
  • Is this on Linux or Windows? Root / Local Administrator rights SHOULD get the job done...
    – JimNim
    Mar 30, 2017 at 14:47

2 Answers 2

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I bought a new drive, powered down the machine, and replaced the failing drive

You shouldn't need to power down the system for a simple drive replacement, since those components are hot-swappable... but if you're having trouble getting OMSA installed to check that from within the OS, then viewing the status of the drives from the PERC BIOS menu is the next easiest option.

Does the final drive say "Rebuild" because it's rebuilding the Hotspare? Or is something else entirely happening?

A drive with "rebuild" status is the current TARGET of the rebuild - that is to say, the missing RAID data that's being reconstructed is being written to that drive. Most likely, this drive was already assigned as a hot spare. You may not see a rebuild to the spare start automatically when the problem drive has not actually failed yet, which would explain why it's only showing this now after you swapped it.

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I would suggest the MegaCLI utility for keeping an eye on what the PERC controller is doing.

megacli -PDList -aALL
...will return a lot of information about the status of the disks.

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    I'm sure the OP would appreciate some more detail about how exactly to use MegaCLI, which is a huge ball of cruft, to do what they need.
    – womble ♦
    Mar 30, 2017 at 0:19
  • megacli -PDList -aALL ...will return a bunch of info about the state of the controller & disks. I only use it in Linux myself but there's a Windows version too.
    – bootbeast
    Mar 30, 2017 at 20:29
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    You'd be best off editing your answer to include this relevant information.
    – womble ♦
    Mar 30, 2017 at 23:47

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