Hi, Before assigning a drive as a hot spare, it will need to be in a ready state. With the drive not being listed, it is more than likely failed. Try reseating the drive or if you have a spare slot, move the drive to the spare slot. Check in OMSA under the physical drives and see if is listed. If not listed as failed or ready, it is probably totally failed and the controller is not seeing the drive at all and the drive will need to replaced. [URL] Thank you,
  Hi All, I have a Dell PE510 with a 6Gbps SAS HBA (system), Perc H700 (internal RAID5 array) and Perc H800 (External JBOD RAID5 using two connectors with 4 physical drives on each and no spare – For B2D backup).  A drive in this JBOD died a month ago so I replaced it with a like kind and checking in OMSA, thought it had rebuilt where all 8 physical drives were again in use for the VD.  I just looked in OMSA and I now see that the same connector is only showing 3 (instead of 4) physical disks and the VD shows a degraded state.  The drive I had replaced is in use but another of the four on that connector is now not showing in the physical disk list.  Instead, OMSA is showing that the VD is degraded and Hot Spare Policy Violated-Not Assigned.  When I choose to Assign Dedicated Hot Spare, I get the following error msg. “Storage management only displays those disks that can be used as a hot spare.  There are currently no disks that are available, large enough, or of the correct type to be used as a hot spare for this VD.”  The VD is still maintaining its normal size and functionality (but listed as degraded).  Normally, I would think maybe this other drive just died, but I’d expect to see it still in the physical disk list as “failed”.  I’m looking for explanation ideas and a solution…..tnx    
Virtual Drive Degraded Hot Spare Policy Violated