Adaptec RAID arcconf – creating array from Linux command line

adaptecOne of our customers decided to add 2 more disks to his Adaptec 5085 SATA RAID controller and asked me to create RAID1 array. Of course not at the time when I could easily do it from the controller BIOS so I had to resort to Adaptec arcconf command line tool.

The documentation claims that pretty much all controller maintenance could be done using arcconf. And I do really believe it. There is one small problem though – the provided documentation is very unfirendly and in context of our task – inaccurate as well.
Lets begin.

  • Find out current controller state, physical drives in particular – we would like to know what are the spare drives not configured for any array

    We have 5 disks: 0,1 – logical disk #0 RAID1, 2 – loagical disk #0 hot spare, 3,4 – unused disks for our new RAID1 array.
  • Lets create logical disk #1 out of physical disks 3 and 4.

    In our command line: arcconf create 1 logicaldrive max 1 0,3 0,4:
    create – controller command
    1 – controller # ( if you have more than 1)
    logicaldrive – target of create command
    max – size of logical drive in megabytes (all of it in our case)
    1 – RAID level (1 – mirror)
    0,3 0,4 – channel, physical device id # ( comma is very important in this case – all instructions I saw so far didn’t have the comma and thus incorrect)
    [noprompt] – I would’ve use that to avoid confirmation dialog but I forgot. It came out all right regardless.
  • Now system should detect appearance of the new device
  • We will also want to check the new logical disk #1 appearance on the controller
  • The only thing that left is to format the new disk and add it to the system.

    The warning is not a problem because we can see and access /dev/sdb1 already.

    Thank you for your time.

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