Failed Disk on PE4400

[Aaron Smith]

I've got a Poweredge 4400 (yep...oldie but goodie!) that has two RAID 5
arrays set up on it's PERC3.  Each has 3 disks and one array holds the
OS partitions and the other array is for a database partition.
Yesterday, one of the disks (slot 02) in the OS partition array went
"dead" and the array went into degraded mode.  They told the array to
rebuild, which it did successfully, and ordered a new drive to replace
it.  However, today, before the new drive arrived, it went down again.
This time, however, it refuses to rebuild the array (from the BIOS
tools) and won't boot in degraded mode.  The troubling aspect is that
this is the third time this has happened.  The other two times it was
the same slot (slot 02) and each time the disk was replaced with a brand
new disk.  The last occurrence was about 1 year ago.

 

Some questions:

 

1.)     Is it possible that there is something physically wrong with
either the Perc controller itself or the backplane that is causing these
disks to fail?

2.)     We have a second 4400 that matches the hardware configuration of
this one exactly (they were ordered together).  I assume it would be
possible (if a bad PERC controller is to blame) to remove all the disks
from the one (carefully labeling them to keep them in the right order)
and swap them with the other?

3.)     They're trying to get afacli running on the downed machine by
using a rescue CD (Super Rescue, which loads a somewhat stripped down
version of redhat linux) but when they try "open afa0" it says "No such
controller".  I think it might just be missing a device file or some
such.  I think it's possible to create that manuall, but am uncertain of
the procedure.

 

-Aaron 

 

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