Spare disk

[pwi]

Hi

I've a Thecus N5200 with 1.00.04.3 firmware. I've installed it with five Maxtor 500 Go disks, configured with 1 spare and a RAID 5 group with the 4 other disks.

One on my disks has been said HS by the Thecus.

I thought that this was the rule of the spare disk to automatically take the place of the hs disk, but apparently not. Just the GUI says that raid is damaged and advertises me to shutdown and replace the disk...

So I've done. Now the raid is rebuilding. But only three disks are in use, or at least only three leds blink green. Spare and new disks leds are off. In the config, spare disk is always checked as spare, and new disk in not check at all. More, as all boxes are greyed, I cannot affect the new disk as spare nor to the raid.

So I'm a bit confused.
- could anyone explain to me what is the exact rule of the spare disk ?
- how do I can now add my new disk to the existing raid group ?

thanks in advance
Regards

[quick]

Any news (bad or good) on how this ended.

Do you still have your data?
Still rebuilding...??

[pwi]

Well, we've suffered here of a global power failure ! I hope this will be the last step of this story !

So, thecus has restarted its raid rebuilt.

I'm currently saving my data to an external disk. They are always here, and r/w available during the rebuilding process.

I always have five blue leds, and only three blinking green leds. Spare and new disks do not seem to be accessed.

[pwi]

After the night...

I've decided to upgrade from 1.00.04.3 to 1.00.04. No great improvement from my current point of view...

As I've successfully saved all my data. I've tried to hot-unplug the new disk, and hot replug it, all that during the rebuild process. And surprise, the new disk has automatically been recognized as a spare disk (the box is checked). So this is a progress (I'm not sure ? ;-))

So, I've now a raid 5 group with three disks, and two spare disks. Not sure what to do with these spares ? At least one of them should be automatically integrated in the raid 5 group, shouldn't it ?

I need a small (or big) word of explanation about the spare, please... Thanks in advance

Regards