Removing or Adding a disk to a HP MSA60 array crashes everything

hardware-raidhphp-prolianthp-smart-arrayraid5

I am really new to RAIDs and all that goes along with them.

I simply added a disk (same 500mb size and part number) into the MSA60 raid enclosure and basically everything started going wrong. The raid 5 (3 hds) crashed and subsequently all the VMs running on that raid stopped working.

I was under the impression that you could add disks at runtime, thats what all this hot swap business was about?

Its a MSA60 running off a P800 raid controller in a HP DL380 G5. Windows Server 2008 r2

The machine reboots and sees the disk ok

So my question – When adding a disk to an existing raid, or to a raid enclosure to create a NEW raid, do you need to power down the machine to do so?

MORE INFO – 19/06/2012

I found another couple of disks and tried those in the machine. Same thing happened. The raid just slowly, over the span of around 5 mins, ground to a halt.

Best Answer

Your MSA60 is attached to something... a RAID controller. Maybe a Smart Array P800?

  • Are you saying that you simply inserted a disk into the enclosure?
  • Or are you saying that you inserted the disk into the enclosure and used the HP Array Configuration utility to add the newly-inserted disk to an existing array and expand the logical drives?

If the former, there could be a physical problem. If the latter, we need to understand the steps you took.

  • What operating systems are involved?
  • What virtualization hypervisor are you referring to?
  • What type of server is connected to the array?

Either way, both actions can be done hot without impacting the system. A shutdown or reboot is not required in most cases.

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