2650 - PERC 3/Di and failed drive

[Craig White]

Spent about 2.5 hours on the phone w/ Dell tech support but dead ended
(and about 4 more hours sandwiched around this call)

I have a 5 disk RAID 5 array (2650 - PERC 3/Di ) and one drive failed
and I can't get it back online. In the PERC Array Config Utility, the
0:0 drive reports 'Missing Member'

afacli shows...

AFA0> container list
Executing: container list
Num          Total  Oth Chunk          Scsi   Partition
Label Type   Size   Ctr Size   Usage   B:ID:L Offset:Size
----- ------ ------ --- ------ ------- ------ -------------
 0    RAID-5  273GB       32KB Open    ?:??:?  - Missing -
 /dev/sda                              0:01:0 64.0KB:68.3GB
                                       0:02:0 64.0KB:68.3GB
                                       0:03:0 64.0KB:68.3GB
                                       0:04:0 64.0KB:68.3GB


AFA0> disk list
Executing: disk list

B:ID:L  Device Type     Blocks    Bytes/Block Usage            Shared
Rate
------  --------------  --------- ----------- ---------------- ------
----
0:00:0   Disk            143374650 512         Initialized      NO
160
0:01:0   Disk            143374650 512         Initialized      NO
160
0:02:0   Disk            143374650 512         Initialized      NO
160
0:03:0   Disk            143374650 512         Initialized      NO
160
0:04:0   Disk            143374650 512         Initialized      NO
160

AFA0> disk show space
Executing: disk show space

Scsi B:ID:L Usage      Size
----------- ---------- -------------
  0:00:0     Free      64.0KB:68.3GB
  0:01:0     Container 64.0KB:68.3GB
  0:01:0     Free      68.3GB:7.50KB
  0:02:0     Container 64.0KB:68.3GB
  0:02:0     Free      68.3GB:7.50KB
  0:03:0     Container 64.0KB:68.3GB
  0:03:0     Free      68.3GB:7.50KB
  0:04:0     Container 64.0KB:68.3GB
  0:04:0     Free      68.3GB:7.50KB

AFA0> container show failover
Executing: container show failover

Container Scsi B:ID:L
--------- ----------------------------------
  0       0:00:0

I went through a number of exercising including ejecting the disk and
re-inserting it, shutting down, removing disk, starting up, shutting
down, inserting disk, starting up but the disk doesn't seem to ever show
any interest in coming online again.

This shows the 'missing' drive set to be a failover drive which comes as
the result of a series of instructions from Dell Tech support which I
believe went like this...

disk blink (0,0,0) 15
enclosure prepare slot 0 0
# at which point I would eject, wait 10 secs and reinsert drive
container list
disk show space
container rescan # which always fails...seems that command isn't
supported here
disk remove dead_partitions (0,0,0)
container set failover 0 (0,0,0)

which leaves me in the state as you see above which never assigns the
'spare' drive as the 'missing member' of the RAID and thus my array
remains 'degraded'

Dell Technician suggested I copy all off to a hard drive, re-set the
array but that's rather crappy that the first drive belch I get on this
system takes the RAID array out.

Anyone have suggestions?

Craig