[cobalt-users] Re: RAID failure

[Chris West <chrisw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tunc,

Regarding your question on the RAID... did you receive an Active Monitor
e-mail alert
that indicated which drive had failed? Our alert e-mail said "drive 1"
had failed --- which was
the primary. (the 550's w/ RAID have a primary drive which mirrors to
the secondary drive
and I believe it is marked on the chassis as "1" and "2")

We just had a drive fail on a fairly new Raq550 that we purchased and
had to
replace it this week. It was under warranty, so we called Sun and they
overnighted us
a replacement drive.

One thing to be careful of is this, per our conversation with Sun. They
said to first
power down, remove the bad drive. If the primary drive failed, they said
to move
the mirrored secondary drive -into- the primary drive position and
restart again with
just that drive in the system so that it "recognizes" the drive
properly.

Then... power down, put in the fresh replacement drive into the
-secondary- drive position
and then restart once more and it should mirror properly. Ideally, they
said that this
process should not be necessary and that it will auto-detect everything
correctly but ...
honestly, I will happily err on the side of caution and do it the "ultra
safe" way since it
only takes a few extra minutes.

The big thing that you want to avoid doing is accidentally mirroring
over the
new (empty) drive over top of the drive with data on it. I would really
suggest
just calling them and reviewing these steps with them directly to make
sure since
I don't know which of your drives (pri or sec) failed... and you'll
probably need to
call them anyways to get them to send out the replacement.

Thanks,
- Chris