[rescue] A5000 quandry, and What can make a drive fail like this?

[Barry Callahan]

Our fileserver's an Ultra2 which boots off an internal disk and has an attached 
A5000 (14-9GB drives, the last two of which are hot spares)

The UPS that our fileserver was sitting on failed, and the machine went down.
When we restored power to it, the system disk appears to have lost its disk 
label (format reports that it's of unknown type) and that it's unformatted.

I pulled the drive out, put a new one in, and reloaded Solaris 9 on it.  Now, 
I'm trying to figure out how to go about making the system see the RAID again, 
since, wouldn't you know - I don't appear to have a backup of the md.tab file.

First, I'd like to know if anyone has a suggestion as to how I could tell the 
system to load one of the database replicas off of one of the disks in the A5000 
and rebuild the md.tab file.

Next, I'd like to know what's likely the problem with a drive when a system 
suddenly claims it's no longer formatted?  Could it be that the controller board 
on the drive is bad?  If so, I've got another one (Seagate Cheetah ST39102LC) 
that I could swap controller boards with to try and recover the old md.tab file.

If I have to lose the data on the array, it's not a huge loss.  It's 
predominantly used as a holding area for the backups of other machines, and as a 
centralized collection area for data that also exists on other machines on the 
network.  But I'd hate to see that happen if it can be helped.


Thanks.