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I have a failed drive that is reported in HP Diagnostics

It tells me that Logical Drive 5 has a drive that is about to fail. The name of that hard drive (according to HP Diag) is Hard Drive 36.

I click "Start Drive Identity LED" and the drive and see Drive #1 of my MSA2000 blinking.

I then launch the Array Configuration Utility, and after clicking on all my SAS arrays (and clicking "more information") I discover the RAID name is Drive Array A located in "Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 1"

I was asked by management to tell them what drive letter of my Windows system was at risk or may have suffered degraded performance... but I don't know how to correlate the bolded information above to what's in disk manager.

Question

How do I map the drives within an HP Array to a Windows Logical Disk?

makerofthings7
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3 Answers3

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HP Diagnostics is a suite that tests and monitors the state of your hardware, and alerts you of a failure or pending failure (for the parts that support predictive failure.

The Array Config Utility (ACU) is for creating logical RAID volumes of physical disks. I don't remember if the ACU is the GUI Tool (accessible in Windows) or the boot-time tool, but they pretty much come to the same thing. (The GUI tool is more convenient for some people, but it is more limited.) This is what's called "Hardware RAID."

The Windows Disk Manager is for managing Logical volumes, that have no knowledge of the disks below. From here, however, you can combine volumes with Software RAID, but since you're on server hardware, that is a poor choice. (I think that the software RAID was always intended for XP users and desktop computers.)

As Chopper3 said, it's how you set up your arrays.

If the RAID Volumes are different sizes, it is easy to correlate the in Disk Manager (within Windows) or Explorer and match volume size to logical disk.

In the ACU, either Blink the disk's lights and look for which RAID Volume it's listed under, or Blink the RAID Volume, to see which in one it gets included.

Why is management questioning what drive letter has a failing disk? It doesn't matter - You replace the disk!

gWaldo
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  • Knowing the failed array allows the business to gauge risk during the failure. If a server's only Fault Tolerance is RAID + Backups, a second drive failure would be a service outage. The IT risk manager should know of simultaneous RAID Rebuild and backup events, since that disk load may impact production. Besides, the last sentence comes off a bit arrogant or flippant. – makerofthings7 Feb 05 '12 at 18:07
  • My statement isn't at all flippant. The lesson for poor managers (since left behind) was 'If you get a flat tire, you replace it.' Often pennies were skimped and dollars spent foolishly, and when I detect a whiff of that, I feel professional outrage. It is certainly worthwhile knowing how to match a logical volume to a physical disk, and when one fails, the impact of what is on a particular disk. I may rightfully be accused of being arrogant, but that is borne of being good at my job and a long suffering of foolishness. Admittedly, my impatience with such is a fault. – gWaldo Feb 05 '12 at 22:37
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If you select the logical disk under Systems And Devices and click on More Information, you should see which physical drives make up the logical disk and the windows partition info (see under Disk Name and Disk Partition Information).

here's a screenshot

I think that should tell you everything you need to know.

Chris
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There's no direct default correlation, it depends how you've built your arrays and logical disks, then how they've been setup on you OS - there's nothing we can help you with without all of that detail.

Chopper3
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