I recently observed this strange behavior from a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with PERC 6/i RAID controller.
– One drive member from a RAID-5 array was failed
– I pulled out the defective drive and pop in a brand new drive
– Strangely, it did not started to sync and after a few moment, the drive was identified as bad and I could observe a “Removed” state from OMSA.
– I could also notice in the PERC firmware utility that the new drive contain a foreign RAID-0 configuration.
Here is the steps I took to resolve this matter :
1. Do not remove the new drive marked as bad/Removed
2. Reboot the server and enter in the PERC firmware utility (CTRL+R)
3. Remove the new drive marked as bad/Removed while you are in the controller (DON’T PANIC, all the virtual disk information will vanish under “Controller 0” after removing the new drive!)
4. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to exit the PERC firmware
5. Boot the server, leaving the new drive out of the bay
6. Once your server is succesfuly booted with the array in degraded mode, pop the new drive in
Your array rebuild should start shortly!