Re: Replace Disk Unit Under Parity Protection

Hello,

I have an old 270 that I only use for experimental purposes. :-) It's
no longer in any sort of production/development use, so we dropped
hardware maintenance for it. I just use it for "play."

Recently (not sure exactly when, since I rarely use this box) it started
receiving disk errors. Apparently one of the drives in the parity set
failed. (All disks on the system are arranged into a single parity, aka
RAID5, set.)

I have a spare drive for this system, and would like to replace it
myself (since there's no maintenance) but I don't know how to proceed.

I tried taking the system down, pulling out the old unit, plugging in
the new one... but it fails to IPL. I didn't write down the SRC, but
it meant something about an "invalid configuration."

I also tried IPLing without the failed unit (with nothing in it's place)
and this also failed to IPL. (Same SRC)

Apparently, it'll only IPL with the original (failed) drive in place.
So I'm thinking I need to somehow tell the system to forget about this
bad drive, and to accept the new one. But, I haven't been able to
figure out how to do that?

I see that the "Backup and Recovery" manual has instructions for
removing a drive from a parity set, or adding a drive to a parity set.
Seems like this'd work, provided that there's enough empty space to run
without the failed drive for a few minutes. But, surely, this isn't the
only way? There must be a way to add a drive and repopulate it from the
parity data, right?

Any help appreciated.
--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.