Man I wish I always got reports like this one! In my previous testing I have not been able to recreate this issue. I will try this soonish on my equipment. I do have some circumstantial evidence that this might be a SATA only issue. I do not have a SATA board handy so I might have to call on the community to lend/give me one of these beasts.
Stay tuned, this is on my radar. On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 02:05:39PM -0600, Matthew Mulrooney wrote: > 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).
