I am up against a wall on a Proliant with a 3300 es raid card and seven 18.2 drives configured as a raid level 5.

we had a drive fail in the array and replaced the drive, by accident we installed a 9.1 gig drive instead of the correct 18.2, after discovering the mistake (a few days later) we installed the correct 18.2 drive and we still have a drive failure. yes I ordered a second 18.2 from you and still the same error.

running smart start raid diagnostics the test indicates the (correct 18.2) "drive is to small a capacity replace with the correct drive" so the card thinks it is looking at a 9.1 gig drive. the array configuration manager indicates a missing drive and won't let me modify the configuration until I replace the drive.

anyone got a fix before I wipe the card and the os to rebuild it all, this is a live server

Before I destroy and rebuild the configuration this weekend loosing the Win2003 server Operating system! anyone any thoughts or the name of a guru that may advise me of a fix?

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WOW sucks. I've had this happen before, I just had to bite the bullet.

ok so the configuration is looking for the 9G drive. put it back, then you can reset the configuration and replace the 9 witht he 18.

good idea. anyhow, the server is still online, right? so you can run a proper backup, and rebuild the entire raid from scratch, if you can't force the new hdd online.

the general action plan would be to put in the 9gb drive, make sure the system sees it, take it offline in the raid bios, then take it out and put the 18gb drive in. let the system rescan the scsi bus and do whatever your card requires to replace a hdd in a degraded array (usually assign it as a hotspare and let the controller take it into the array automatically and start the rebuild)

Thanks for the tip, I just tried that, the card still wont allow config changes untill i install the proper drive. I am thinking at this time it may be a controller failure. I will post the fix here when i am done.

before you do that, make sure all your firmware levels are up to date, thi si very important both on the drives and the controller.
and if you're updating the firmware on the controller, MAKE SURE to update the driver BEFORE that

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