A SATA drive (Western Digital 2500SD) from a 3Ware 9500S array went offline and was replaced by a hot-spare. I pulled the "bad" drive and put it in a machine with a basic Promise SATA controller and booted up Western Digital's diagnostic program to test the drive. The DLGDIAG program reported "DRIVE IS LOCKED". It turns out that the 3Ware card "locks" the drive and it is only unlockable (according to 3Ware) by shutting down the server, connecting the bad drive back to the 9500S, pulling all of the other drives so they are not seen on bootup, power up the machine, go into the 3Ware BIOS and delete the array that the drive belongs to. Then power down and reconnect all of the other drives. This of course is not something I want to have to do. Kind of defeats the idea of having a hot-swap RAID system that stays up all the time. Short of buying another 9500S card to use once in a (hopefully great) while to unlock a bad drive, does anyone know of a way to unlock a drive? Any utility that does this? I had not heard of this "feature" before. Thanks, Steve
