dealing with a failing drive

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Jerry
> McAllister
> Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 8:04 AM
> To: David Newman
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: dealing with a failing drive
> 
> 
> On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 05:22:06PM -0800, David Newman wrote:

> > I vaguely remember trying about a year ago to load a SMART utility from
> > the ports collection but it wouldn't work on drives in a RAID array.
> > 
> > Is there some other way to:
> > 
> > a) diagnose/fix the errant disk here?
> > b) monitor the health of disks on a Compaq controller so it doesn't get
> > to this point to begin with?
> > 

Hi David,  apologies to Jerry for jumping in.

Compaq uses several RAID cards most are under the so-called
"SmartArray" using the ida driver.  If this is yours, you can
use a utility called "idacontrol" that can monitor the array,
here's the instructions for using it.  You will need usrsbin 
sources installed:


) Install idacontrol


cd /usr/ports
mkdir distfiles
cd /usr/ports/distfiles
mkdir manual-build
cd manual-build
fetch ftp://ftp.jurai.net/users/winter/idacontrol.tar
cd /usr/src
tar xf /usr/ports/distfiles/manual-build/idacontrol.tar

cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/idacontrol

vi makefile  change variable NOMAN to NO_MAN
make obj && make depend && make && make install

cd

idacontrol show | grep "Status"

IF status is fully up it will say:

Status: Logical drive ok

IF status is degraded it will say 1 of several other error messages.


More on PR i386/70482
and on thread:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-scsi/2005-September/002009.html


NOTE:

The smart utility only works on SATA or ATA/IDE drives, not SCSI.

Ted