Compaq 3200 manual Handling Disk Drive Failures

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Handling Disk Drive Failures

Although drive failures are not common, it is important to protect your critical data. The best way to recover from a failed drive is to configure your drive system with some form of fault tolerance.

To ensure a quick and transparent recovery, Compaq recommends that you configure your Smart Array 3200 Controller with hardware fault tolerance. Another advantage of hardware fault tolerance is that the controller is able to perform a background surface analysis on the hard drives to monitor for bad sectors and to remap data to a new location on the media. This feature enhances the reliability and availability of your data. Compaq also recommends that you use good back-up procedures, in case of catastrophic failure.

If you discover a failed drive:

■Identify and document which physical drive has failed. Note the drive type and capacity.

■Note which partition and volume, if any, has failed. This information is provided in the error message on the server console. It is also recorded in the server error log file, which can be viewed using the SYSCON utility (intraNetWare 3.12) or NWADMIN utility (NetWare 4.x).

■Make sure you have a recent backup. If the drive is part of a fault- tolerant mirrored volume, or a hardware fault-tolerant volume, you will be able to back up the data again in case of a second drive failure.

■Locate a replacement drive of the same type and capacity.

■Follow the instructions in the following sections for replacing a drive in your server configuration.

Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller Reference Guide