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 Files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\client>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.
Syntax check complete.
Executing script...
Script execution complete.
SMcli completed successfully.