From your previous post and my min exposure I assume: After I clear the foreign config the disk will come to a ready state.  From there i will be able to convert it to a hot spare which will allow me to add it back into the current array bring it "online" again.   Is that about right?  Setting it as a hot spare should be the last step you need to perform. As soon as you set it as a hot spare it should start rebuilding. It can take several minutes for management applications like OpenManage to report the drive status changing from "ready" to "rebuilding". You should have two options on most of our controllers for a hot spare, global and dedicated. A dedicated hot spare is assigned to a virtual disk. A global hot spare will rebuild into any virtual disk on the controller. If you want the hot spare to only be used by a specific virtual disk then you can use dedicated hot spare to assign it to that virtual disk. You can find a link for storage manuals on our PERC page. The manual for the PERC should contain more information about the available tasks. [URL] Thanks
ISSUE I have a Dell PowerEdge r720 rack-mounted server.  The server has 4 drives and the raid has been set up as a RAID 6. While on a site visit, I was told that one drive went bad and needed replacing.   - The Tier 1 techs had already pulled out the bad drive before i arrived (Disk 1).   - Upon arrival, I inserted a new drive into Disk 1.  The drive started to blink fast and appeared to automatically be rebuilding.  I also noticed they other disk were all fast blinking green (0,1,3).   Disk 2 stayed solid green. - Next morning, i rebooted the server and entered the Raid controller BIOS.  I then found that the raid was in a degraded status and that Disk 2 was in a "Foreign" State. At present, disk 0,1,3 are in a RAID 6, however disk 2 is in a "Foreign" State.  My assumption is that the Tier 1 support pulled disk 2 out and may have tried to swap with disk 1..   Or at the very least they pulled out disk 2 - which is causing the foreign configuration state.    I have reviewed the foreign configuration and it is what they had before to the best of my knowledge, but i am not certain that DISK 2 and Disk 1 are in the original positions.    QUESTIONS 1.  What will be the impact if i clear the foreign state of disk 2?  Also, once the disk goes to "Ready" state, is it possible to bring Disk 2 back into the VD that is already created. 2. What will be the impact if i import the foreign state of disk 2 and the disks are not in the exact same position as before?   Thank you all for your responses. Lawrence  
PowerEdge r720 Perc Raid Controller Foreign Disk