Replacing a failed and degraded virtual disk on Dell T110 II RAID 1 PERC S300

Question

We have a Dell T110 II server, factory installed with Microsoft Windows Server 2012, Standard x64 Edition, running PERC S300 RAID Controller (1068E HBA).

It came installed with RAID 1 on the 500GB operating system disk. We've since added another 1TB data disk

OMSA is reporting both a virtual disk failure and a degraded disk (see screen shots).

So my questions are:

• Should I be replacing the physical disks? If so, which one(s) is(are) at fault?
• How can I fix the virtual disk failure / degraded issues?

In anticipation of a few questions, I know an S300 isn't a great RAID solution (nothing I can do about that right now), and I have several full backups!

Solution

There isn't enough information from those events to know for certain what's going on. I would guess that the drive went offline and into a "failed" state at one point, then was reset in some way which brought it back online normally.

I would recommend that you look back through the event history a bit further for more events on physical disk 0:0 to see what triggered the initial problem. If you see a lot of Sense Key 3/11/00 or 4/xx/xx errors leading up to the failure, that's a pretty sure sign you should consider replacing it. Otherwise, you could always try reseating the drive to see if the system will start a "rebuild", or possibly reboot w/ the drive removed and set after things are up and running.

With this type of controller, I think you can even sometimes end up stuck with having to re-initialize the RAID from the BIOS and reinstall the OS to clear things up entirely. I'd recommend ensuring your driver and FW revisions are up-to-date before resorting to that (plus calling Dell support for other suggestions and assistance).