Yesterday I had an issue appear in Dell MDSM (Modular Disk Storage Manager), which reported unreadable sectors detected. In MDSM I went to the Support tab and chose gather support information in order to save the support information to a zip file on the server running MDSM.

Inside this zip file was a file called unreadableSectors.txt. This file showed that the disk in slot 5, enclosure 0 was the source of these issues.

We had a hot spare available in slot 14, so before getting Dell to replace the faulty disk I decided to mark the disk as failed and get the Hot Spare to kick into action. Manually failing a disk on a Dell PowerVault MD3000i SAN Array is quite straight forward, but it isn’t something that is available in the MDSM gui. Below is the path to the utility and the command to fail disk 5.

Open a command prompt and navigate to :

C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\MD Storage Software\MD Storage Manager\client\

Execute the following command, where IPAddress is the IP Address of one of the management interfaces on the SAN Array :

SMcli.exe ipaddress

You should get the response :

Entering interactive mode. Please type desired command.

Enter the following command to fail disk 5 in enclosure 0 :

set physicalDisk [0,5] operationalState=failed;

After an hour or two disk 14 had been completely built and the SAN was back to normal operation using the hot spare instead of disk 5. A quick call to Dell ProSupport had a technician and the disk on site within 2 hours and the fault disk 5 swapped out. The SAN is now in the process of rebuilding disk 5 in order to return disk 14 to hot spare status.