3ware 9650SE-4LPML RAID array Degraded
Nov 20, 2009 Server Virtualization, Technology
This week I have started to look into converting my home Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) x64 VMware Server 1.0.5 server to ESXi. The main reason behind this is that my work runs ESX 3.5 and I am trying to learn a bit more items related to ESX. Before I fully wiped all of my system I wanted to make sure that ESXi would run on my hardware, so I removed my 9650 card as well as the SATA connection to my main boot drive. This way I could revert back to my old system without loosing anything if ESXi would not run. The motherboard I have in the system is a MSI K9A2 Platinum AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX ATX board which can boot from USB. I have picked up an 8GB USB flash drive to run ESXi on instead of a hard drive. After a lot of tweaking ESXi was running smooth on my system without my RAID drives and it was time to boot back into my original system to get some files and configurations off. During the system boot I was notified that the RAID array has been degraded and that there was a problem. Below I will show you the trouble shooting steps I used to get the RAID array back online and rebuilt.
Open up a terminal window or SSH connection to the machine with the degraded RAID array. Once you are there make sure you have installed the tw_cli. If you do not have the tw_cli you can get it at the 3Ware support downloads here. Run the following:
sudo tw_cli
Next we need to find out what commands we have available for the tw_cli so we type a ? and hit enter.
Now that we know what commands are available we need to see what controllers we have. Now we issue the show command.
Now we see that we have 1 controller (c0) installed that has 4 connections available as dictated by the (V) Ports column (blue box). Then we see that there are only 3 drives recognized by the controller which is shown by the Drives column (red box). Now that we know what controllers are installed we can get more information than that. Now run:
/c0 show
This shows that unit 0 is setup to be RAID-10 and it is DEGRADED (blue box). We also see that port 2 is not present (red box). After we have this information we can determine that the drive needs to be replaced or that a power/SATA cable has been unplugged. I shut my system down and checked for loose cables first. After finding that I had bumped the power connection on the p2 drive I turned the system back on and booted into the 3Ware BIOS application by pressing the ALT+3 keys. Now that you are in the BIOS manager follow the steps below:
- Arrow down to the RAID array that is degraded press Enter to put a * next to the array.
- Then tab over to the Maintain Unit button at the bottom and hit enter.
- From the Maintain menu select Rebuild
- On the Rebuild Disk Array screen select the OK button
- It will bring you back to the main screen but will now say REBUILD 0% at the end of the array.
- Press F8 to exit and select Y to save the settings
Now the you have done that the system will restart. The RAID array will start to rebuild itself once the machine is booted up. To verify this you will need to run the tw_cli application again using the steps above. You will notice when you run the tw_cli /c0 show command you will see the Unit status as REBUILDING with a %RCmpl percent (blue box in picture below) and that p2 status is still DEGRADED (red box in below picture).
Once the array has completed rebuilding you will see a status of OK and the %RCmpl will be just a dash as shown by the blue box in the picture below.
Enjoy having a rebuilt RAID array!
