Hi All,

 

I am running version: 4.7 - tried to access some files on a share earlier today and the drive light for one of the disks has been on ever since. I shut down the array and restarted, however the disk light is still on and flashes occasionally.

 

The rest of the drives just show "Mounting" and have done for the past 30 mins. I'm assuming the issue with this drive is causing that.

 

Is it ok to remove this disk and power up the array so that the remaining drives are accessible? Anything I should look out for if doing so, or anything I should not do?

 

Any help would be great as I urgently need to access the shares, and can troubleshoot this issue tomorrow.

 

Thanks,

Don

 

UPDATE: 3 of the 7 drives are now showing as mounted....any idea what it is doing? Can't be running a parity check as not all drives have been mounted...

Attach a syslog.

Thanks for the reply, but I really don't see how it helps in any way - that is not an answer to my question. I am fully aware that in order to troubleshoot, a log file is required.

 

I appreciate that you are a senior member and are able to assist with issues, as I have seen in many of your helpful posts, but "attach a syslog" is not an answer to all questions.

 

My only priority right now is to access the server, without the problematic drive if necessary. All I would like to know is will removing this disk affect anything if the array is started without it, and whether it can be re-added when troubleshooting without causing any problems.

 

 

My only priority right now is to access the server, without the problematic drive if necessary. All I would like to know is will removing this disk affect anything if the array is started without it, and whether it can be re-added when troubleshooting without causing any problems.

Without a syslog, it's hard to answer your questions accurately, but my uneducated opinion is that your drives are replaying transactions that were queued when you forced the shutdown. If you look at the syslog, you should see something to that effect, and as the drives are done with the replay, they will become available. I suggest you either wait to see if more of the drives come online, or post the syslog so we can see what exactly is going on to cause the issue.

 

Forcing another shutdown is not likely to be productive, as it will likely cause the array to be offline even longer, or could possibly cause you to lose data if you guess wrong as to the root cause of the initial issue.

Thank you Jonathan,

 

It seems your assumption was spot on - the drives have now all come online and the shares are available after approx 2 hours of drive activity and drives becoming slowly available.

 

I would also like to apologise to dgaschk, as I did not realise that a syslog would have helped in determining whether a drive could be safely removed. Queued transactions was not something I was aware of.

 

Thank you once again for explaining what was possibly happening Jonathan.