When addressing a multiple drive failure, there are several key pieces of inform
ation that need to be determined prior to performing any state modifications.
RAID Level
o Is it a RAID 6?
RAID 6 volume group failures occur after 3 drives have failed in the vol
ume group
o Is it a RAID 3/5 or RAID 1?
RAID 5 volume group failures occur after two drives have failed in an vo
lume group.
o RAID 1 volume group failures occur when enough drives fail to cause an
incomplete mirror.
This could be as few as two drives or half the drives + 1.
o RAID 0 volume groups are dead upon the first drive failure
Despite the drive failures is each individual volume group configuration complet
e?
i.e. Are all drives accounted for, regardless of failed or optimal?
How many drives have failed and what volume group does each drive belong?
In what order did the drives fail in each individual volume group?
Are there any global hot spares?
o Are any of the hot spares in use
o Are there any hot spares not in use and if so are they in an optimalco
ndition?
Are there any backend errors that lead to the initial drive failures?
o This is the most common cause of multiple drive failures, all backend
issues must be fixed or isolated before continuing any further
Multiple Drive Failures
o Until the mirror becomes incomplete the RAID 1 pairs will function nor
mally
RAID 0
o As there is no redundancy these arrays cannot generally be recovered.
However, the drives can be revived and checked
no guarantees can be made
that the data will be recovered.
Multiple Drive Failures
Configuration Considerations
offline