[smartmontools-support] pending sectors behind RAID controller, force correction???

[David Mathog]

Greetings all.

Routine smartctl runs on a machine turned up a physical disk with 4 
pending sectors and 4 reallocated events counted.  The problem is, this 
is in a RAID array, but the raid controller
will not talk to the usual RAID control software.  That issue is 
documented here:

https://serverfault.com/questions/919209/megacli-commands-return-exit-code-0x00-with-perc-h200

So, my question is, how does one kick the RAID in a situation like this 
to make it write to those bad blocks so that they will be swapped out 
and the sectors repaired from the redundant information in the RAID set?

The normal "determine where the blocks are in the file system and 
overwrite them" methods don't apply here since the file system is on a 
virtual disk, so there is no way of knowing what is in the affected 
blocks.  The blocks could even be part of the underlying RAID structure. 
  It has been more than 7 days, so normally a patrol read should have 
been run, which should have caught and fixed this.  Apparently not.

I am not very confident that the BIOS/console level tools are going to 
work right, since the supposedly supported perccli software won't talk 
to the controller, the console stuff may not be working right either.  
The system was rebooted once, and luckily it came back up, but that 
didn't let perccli talk to the controller.

Thanks,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech