Summary
-------
Alright, I've upgraded the firmware on this card to the most recent
release (814D from 2006.06.26), and re-run the tests *without* success.
If you have this card, you should avoiding using bioctl to set unused
drives to hotspares at this time.
Specifics
---------
Bad news:
* I've re-run my test sequence *without* success after having upgraded
the firmware to 814D.
* The LSI boot menu still has no option to reset a drive to "Unused"
from "Hot spare"
Good news:
* There is an option in LSI WebBIOS boot menu, to reset a drive to
"Unusued". [This may have been there before - I never tried the
WebBIOS boot menu.]
Bad news:
* I managed to corrupt my array while playing with the bioctl hot-spared
drive in the WebBIOS. [Both the normal boot menu, and the WebBIOS
boot menu think everything is good, but OpenBSD fails to boot with the
following output:
Using drive 0, partition 3.
Loading...
ERR M
] This may have been my fault, but I'm out of time to keep rebuilding
and retesting.
Other
-----
I'm going to push this box into production shortly. None of this stuff
is show stopping (I can live with the occasional after-hours reboot now
that I understand the behaviour). I should also note that bioctl from
this snapshot very conveniently displays the percentage complete of an
array that is rebuilding. :)
If anyone would like me to run some tests before I push this into
production, please contact me soon...
Matthew
> Problem summary (problems with bioctl -H on a SATA 300-8x)
> ===============
> To summarize (I've included the full test case below) - I can now use
> bioctl -H to set an "Unused" drive to "Hot spare". However, despite
> showing as hot spare in *both* bioctl and the LSI boot menu, when I
> fail a drive in my RAID array, the "hot spare" fails to behave as such
> (it will not be integrated into the degraded RAID array).
>
> It gets worse - once a drive has been set as a hot spare through
> bioctl,
> it can never be changed back to unused, nor can it be properly set as a
> hotspare through the LSI boot menu. Essentially that slot is now
> unusable. The only solution that I have found is to "Clear
> configuration" from the LSI boot menu (which then requires reinstall of
> the contents of the drives).
