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

[Bruce Allen]

Hi David,

These are good questions.  Unfortunately I don't have the answers.  (You
are sufficiently informed and experienced that any questions you have
are probably ones for which there is no group knowledge!)

But the good news is that most hardware vendors have realized that
supporting SMART features (at least for knowledgeable end users) is a
worthwhile thing to do.  In addition, many of these vendors use
smartmontools internally, so they share a common language and
understanding with us.

So I suggest that you write a carefully worded letter to the company
that made your RAID card, and ask them how you can force pending sector
bad blocks to get overwritten.

Cheers,
	Bruce





On 09.07.18 19:37, David Mathog wrote:
> 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
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-- 
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Prof. Dr. Bruce Allen, Director
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)
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