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Netware and RAID

Hi-

We have a Netware 5.1 sp5 server, and one of the hard drives in our raid 5 array went bad. The error on the screen stated it was a "NICI CCS: Fatal initilization error". So I replaced the drive, and then rebooted my server. The drive had not finished synchronzation yet, but curious, if this is RAID 5, shouldn't that allow the server to come back up?

I can get into NWCONFIG, and essentially now, I am finding that the reason for the NICI error is that the sys drive is refusing to mount.

My question is how can I get the drive to mount? I am going to leave the server on over night to let the drive rebuild, then try a reboot tomorrow morning.

Thanks!
Scott

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billmercer

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pgm554

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scottman29

ASKER

Bill, no I did not try the mount command, but I will tomorrow first thing. Any idea why it would UnMOUNT?

PGM554, unfortunately, I inherited the server, so no, I didn't get to build the array. There are 3 drives in the array. And after about 40 minutes, the newly inserted drive was rebuilt. What is a vrepair?

Thanks guys, I really need to bring the server back up!

Yours,
Scott

pgm554

When a volume becomes corrupt or unmountable ,vrepar is a utility that will fix any issues that will cause it not to want to mount.(this is for a traditional NW file system)NSS uses something different.But SYS on a NW 5.1 should be trad.So I don't see any issues.

See :

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/qna/845.html

ShineOn

I'm surprised, if it's hardware RAID5, that you had an error at all on the server...

vrepair is the utility for repairing traditional FAT (NWFS) volumes.

DSPoole

RAID-5 should allow for a SINGLE drive failure in the array and the data to be COMPLETELY accessible without incident. Lose a second drive without first replacing the first dead drive in the RAID-5 volume and then you have a problem.

I think you have other more serious issues.

scottman29

ASKER

I'm surprised it won't come back up either. And yes, I'm thinking there may be more serious issues as well. But the server isn't showing me anything else other than the affore mentioned NICI error, so this is all I have to go with. I'm going to get cracking on it today. I'll keep you all posted.

Thanks!
Scott

billmercer

>Any idea why it would UnMOUNT?
More likely it simply never remounted after you rebooted.

It does sound like there could be a more serious problem with your RAID, such as a controller issue, but there is also another possibility...

If you had previously installed an update/service pack, but just not rebooted the server yet, then it could be that your problem is actually caused by some sort of driver/software compatibility problem. In that case, rebooting would have been sufficient to trigger the problem, and the mounting problem really be unrelated to the drive failure. It's worth mentioning, at least.

scottman29

ASKER

Ultimately, the first two solutions were vital in helping me troubleshoot the problem. Upon trying to MOUNT sys, it would fail. So I did the vrepair. Which told me that the directory tree was too long. When I looked that up online, I had to add a set directory length command to the startup.ncf file.

Came right back up. Scary though...

Thanks!
Scott