BRING A DELL POWERVAULT MD3000I DISK ONLINE FROM THE COMMAND LINE

When two drives in a RAID 5 array going offline, so goes your data. If this happens,
hopefully the disks are not truly failed but simply offline for some reason. This was the case
with a client recently. For some reason when we put new drives in the Dell PowerVault
MD3000i it took 2 drives in a RAID 5 array offline which took down a virtual machine that
resided on that datastore.

If you have more than one drive offline and simply re-insert those drives they will still show
as failed and will not come back online and rebuild if necessary. Instead you can force the
state of the drive back to good condition which will bring them back online, after which the
SAN can determine which disks if any needed to be rebuilt.

Below is the command to bring slot 12 in enclosure 0 back online. You will need to modify it
according to what disks have failed, if more than one drive has failed re-run the command a
second time and change the drive number. If you have one or more MD1000 connected to
your MD3000i you will also need to change the enclosure number (in this case 0) to the
correct number.

C:Program FilesDellMD Storage Managerclient>smcli -n "<Storage Array

Name>" -c "revive physicalDisk [0,12]";

After this command is run the drive should come back online and hopefully your data will be
intact.