Offline Disk Group

What Caused the Problem?

A disk group may have an Offline status for the following reasons:

You manually placed the disk group Offline in preparation for moving the physical disks to another storage array (disk group relocation). If this is the reason, then do NOT follow these recovery steps. Instead, follow the instructions in the appropriate documentation for moving physical disks.
You placed the disk group offline from the Command Prompt (see recovery steps below).
You were performing a disk group relocation operation and inserted all of the physical disks in the destination storage array but the disk group is still showing an Offline status.

The Recovery Guru Details area provides specific information you will need as you follow the recovery steps.

Recovery Steps

If...

Then...

The disk group was inadvertently placed Offline

Go to Step 2.

The disk group remains in an Offline status even though you have inserted all physical disks into the destination storage array during a virtual disk relocation operation

The disk group relocation operation probably failed because the unreadable sectors log is full on the destination storage array.

Go to step 3.

Open a Command Prompt, and type the following command:

SMcli -n <storageArray_name>;

where storageArray_name is the name of the storage array listed in the Details area.

Note: If you receive an error from this command, change your working directory to the directory that contains the SMcli executable.

Execute the following command to manually place the disk group online:

set diskGroup [diskGroupNumber] availability=online;

where [diskGroupNumber] is the sequence number of the disk group for which you want to place online.

Go to step 4.

Caution: Possible loss of data accessibility. Recovery from Unreadable Sectors Log Full is a complicated procedure that can involve several different methods. Therefore, do NOT perform any recovery steps (other than the steps to collect all support data below) without the help of your technical support representative.

From the Support tab, click the Gather Support Information link.

In the Specify file field, enter a name for the file to be saved or browse to a previously saved file if you want to overwrite an existing file.

Use the convention "filename.zip" for the name of the file. (The suffix .zip will be added to the file automatically if you do not specify one.) You may also specify another physical disk and directory if you want to save the file in a location other than the default.

Click the Start button.

Contact your technical support representative and indicate that your disk group relocation operation failed and that the disk group remains in an Offline state. The support representative will have you send the file you saved in the steps above and wait for further instruction.

Click the Recheck button to rerun the Recovery Guru. The failure should no longer appear in the Summary area.

Note: Additional information on this issue may be available. Please visit the Dell support website at support.dell.com and select your product model. Choose "troubleshooting" as your tool option, then search by this procedure title.