Users Guide

• The hot spare is unassigned from the virtual disk — This occurs on some controllers if the hot spare is assigned to more than one
virtual disk and is being used to rebuild a failed physical disk for another virtual disk.
• The virtual disk includes failed or corrupt physical disks — This situation may generate alert 2083. For information on alert messages,
see the Server Administrator Messages Reference Guide at Dell.com/support/home.
• The rebuild rate setting is too low — If the rebuild rate setting is quite low and the system is processing a number of operations, then
the rebuild may take an unusual amount of time to complete.
• The rebuild is canceled — Another user can cancel a rebuild that you have initiated.
Rebuilding of virtual disk completes with errors
About this task
A rebuild completes with errors when a portion of the disk containing redundant (parity) information is damaged. The rebuild process can
restore data from the healthy portions of the disk but not from the damaged portion.
When a rebuild is able to restore all data except data from damaged portions of the disk, it indicates successful completion while also
generating alert 2163. For information about the event and error messages generated by the system firmware and agents that monitor
system components, see the Error Code Lookup page at qrl.dell.com
The rebuild may also report sense key errors. In this situation, take the following actions to restore the maximum data possible:
Steps
1. Back up the degraded virtual disk onto a fresh (unused) tape drive.
• If the backup is successful — If the backup completes successfully, then the user data on the virtual disk has not been damaged.
In this case, you can continue with step 2.
• If the backup encounters errors — If the backup encounters errors then the user data has been damaged and cannot be
recovered from the virtual disk. In this case, the only possibility for recovery is to restore from a previous backup of the virtual disk.
2. Perform Check Consistency on the virtual disk that you have backed up onto a tape drive.
3. Restore the virtual disk from the tape drive onto healthy physical disks.
Cannot create a virtual disk
You may be attempting a RAID configuration that is not supported by the controller. Check the following:
• How many virtual disks already exist on the controller? Each controller supports a maximum number of virtual disks.
• Is there adequate available space on the disk? The physical disks that you have selected for creating the virtual disk must have an
adequate amount of free space available.
• The controller may be performing other tasks, such as rebuilding a physical disk, that must run to completion before the controller can
create the new virtual disk.
A virtual disk of minimum size is not visible to Windows Disk
Management
If you create a virtual disk using the minimum allowable size in Storage Management, the virtual disk may not be visible to Windows Disk
Management even after initialization. This occurs because Windows Disk Management is only able to recognize extremely small virtual
disks if they are dynamic. It is advisable to create virtual disks of larger size when using Storage Management.
Virtual disk errors on systems running Linux
About this task
On some versions of the Linux operating system, the virtual disk size is limited to 1TB. If you create a virtual disk that exceeds the 1TB
limitation, your system may experience the following behavior:
• I/O errors to the virtual disk or logical drive.
• Inaccessible virtual disk or logical drive.
• Virtual disk or logical drive size is smaller than expected.
If you have created a virtual disk that exceeds the 1TB limitation, you must:
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Troubleshooting hardware issues