Pro/Forums - View Single Post - Help with 4100 Cracked Raid

frankb3910 · 10-21-2006, 12:49 PM

hello -

I have a dell 705N which is actually a 4100. One hard drive went out, indicated by a flashing light. Tried reformatting, and then rebuilding the raid 5, and that worked fine for awhile and then the drive apparently went out again.

This prompted me to find a replacement drive. I purchased an exact replacement, the Quantum Fireball 60GB - installed, formatted the replacement, but the formatted size is not large enough to allow the raid to rebuild. I did try the /nocore format and that did not appear to change the formatted size.

So I then tried taking that drive out of the snap, put into a std. PC and ran Maxtor's disc formatting utility, doing a low-level format. My thinking was that some bad blocks were keeping the drive from formatting to it's full capacity.

Well that did not work either, nothing changed.

I thought, OK - there must be something wrong with this drive. Found a second replacement drive, put into the snap, executed the /nocore format, and this 2nd replacement drive is formatting to the exact same size as the first one (again, too small to use to rebuild the raid).

If I run an info-device, it tells me the formatted size of the 3 original drives to be 6023884, and BOTH of the replacement drives formatted to exactly 58633216. I cannot see any difference to the physical drives themselves.

Could anyone please help me figure out what to do, I would greatly appreciate it!

10-21-2006, 12:49 PM	#1
frankb3910 Cooling Neophyte Join Date: May 2006 Location: Chicago, IL Posts: 14	Help with 4100 Cracked Raid - Trying to replace 1 Drive hello - I have a dell 705N which is actually a 4100. One hard drive went out, indicated by a flashing light. Tried reformatting, and then rebuilding the raid 5, and that worked fine for awhile and then the drive apparently went out again. This prompted me to find a replacement drive. I purchased an exact replacement, the Quantum Fireball 60GB - installed, formatted the replacement, but the formatted size is not large enough to allow the raid to rebuild. I did try the /nocore format and that did not appear to change the formatted size. So I then tried taking that drive out of the snap, put into a std. PC and ran Maxtor's disc formatting utility, doing a low-level format. My thinking was that some bad blocks were keeping the drive from formatting to it's full capacity. Well that did not work either, nothing changed. I thought, OK - there must be something wrong with this drive. Found a second replacement drive, put into the snap, executed the /nocore format, and this 2nd replacement drive is formatting to the exact same size as the first one (again, too small to use to rebuild the raid). If I run an info-device, it tells me the formatted size of the 3 original drives to be 6023884, and BOTH of the replacement drives formatted to exactly 58633216. I cannot see any difference to the physical drives themselves. Could anyone please help me figure out what to do, I would greatly appreciate it!