On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 15:50 -0500, robert mckennon wrote: > believe it or not, I have never actually swapped out a hard-drive in a > raided system.
We all have our first time with something at some point. No one was born knowing or having done it all before ;) > I have a HP Proliant ML350 G4p running RHEL 5.3 with a bad drive in a raid-5. Assuming you have a HP Smart Array controller or some RAID controller. > It says it's hot-swappable.... but is that the best practice, or > should I shut down and then replace the drive? If the machine is still running, usually the drive will already be taken out of use by the raid controller. Which if thats the case, red light vs green, or could be another color on the drive in question. Then you can safely remove the drive and add back a new one. If using HP Smart Arrays can use the hpacucli to check status, make changes, etc to the array while the machine is up and running. If you want you can take it down. Though you might find yourself with more than one bad drive going that route. I would just swap out the drive now with a known good one. Let it do its thing, once its back in use and you have a spare again. If you want to be really cautious and can take down the server. Then a reboot can't hurt. It will re-initialize controller and do a test on most all drives. Last time I lost a drive for some reason it cause the server to lock up. Though that was before any attempt to replace the drive. A reboot brought the machine back up, but drive was still dead, and luckily just that one. After that replaced the drive, and all has been well ever since. So at times freakish things can happen, even though they technically should not. I am running RAID 5 with 2 spares, so should not have effected the server running, but did. -- William L. Thomson Jr. Obsidian-Studios, Inc. http://www.obsidian-studios.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml Unsubscribe [email protected]
