KB ID 0000874

Problem

The call came in this morning, a client had replaced a failed drive in his SAN, (an MSA P2000 2324sa). He was asking if there was anything he needed to do. I said “Just mark it as a global spare and that should be it”. He rang back some time later to say he was still having problems.

When I dialled on I could see his ‘new’ drive was marked as LEFTOVR and was flagged with the following warning;

The disk may contain stale metadata. Recommended action: Clear the metadata to rescue the disk.

Solution

You see this error because this is a ‘recycled’ disk, and it still has data on it that refers to the array and/or vdisk that it was in originally. This is the ‘metadata’ that it is referring to.

Note: You can see, (from the image above) the disk I’m dealing with is disk 8 (make a mental note of that).

1. With the MSA Selected > Tools > Clear Disk Metadata.

2. Remember our disk is in in slot 8, so tick it and click ‘clear metadata’.

3. You can now treat this disk as if it were a new disk and add it as a global spare, (your failed vdisk will then claim the disk and the RAID should rebuild it without further intervention).

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

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