We are stuck in a RAID 4 Catch-22 and we really can't see any way out of it.

Here's the situation: I have a clustered pair of F760 filers running ONTAP 6.1R1P1. Early Monday morning, disk 6.20 (72 GB drive in a DS14 shelf) failed. Immediately, the filer began to rebuild on spare disk 6.29 and (because of the large size of the volume, approximately 800 GB), the reconstruction was still running at about 7 pm. It was at 7 pm that disk 6.25 experienced an unrecoverable read error on sector 128273044; however, since there is no parity disk available, the filer was unable to recover this data and the filer panicked and rebooted. Fast forward twelve hours and again we're about 90% done with reconstruction and disk 6.25 has an unrecovered read error on sector 128273044; the filer panics, reboots, and the countdown begins again.

Does anyone know of any way out of this dilemma, short of restoring from tape?

Many thanks in advance.

Geoff Hardin UNIX System Administrator Dallas Semiconductor geoff.hardin@dalsemi.com