Raid error

[shwethwe]

My server is bulind raid 5.One of the hdd is failed, that why I replace new one.And then I reboot and see the RAID Uitilies.The new HDD is Free and Volume State is Degraded.MY RAID Controller is areca 1160 and 16 SATA HDDs to bulid RAID 5.What should I do next step?I didn't see rebuild tab in the RAID Uitilie.regards,shwethwe

[Raymond]

That's weird. Even after replacing a new HDD you still get Degraded? Degraded means that one of the disks in a RAID5 set is broken and that it calculates the data it misses from the checksums written on the other disks. This can mean that the disk is totally gone, or that the connection with the disk has been severed.

Usually when you replace a hard drive, the raid set should automatically rebuild. There are times when the raid set does NOT automatically build. You shut down, reboot, go into the raid controller, and manually tell the controller to rebuild adding the new drive.

Worst case scenario, after replacing the failed hard drive, there is no way you are able get the new drive into the array to replace the failed component. However, so long as the system is running, you still have access to the data. Resolution is to back up everything, wipe out the array, make a new one, and restore.