failed drive in a HP Gen 8 microserver running RAID 5

[symbiosis]

I had a failed drive in a HP Gen 8 microserver running RAID 5

I replaced the drive and now when it boots, I get the message:
1778 - drive array resuming automatic data recovery process

The system boots into my OS OK, and I get a flashing orange status LED

Would you say that the message I'm getting is saying that is is rebuilding the array in the background? Would that be why I'm getting the orange LED?

Do I just need to be patient and hope it will rebuild or do I need to be doing something else?

I'm concerned as one of the other drives is noisy as hell and I know a RAID 5 wont cope with 2 lost drives - so I need to know this replacement has been successful

For some reason, if I select the boot option to go to the RAID controller, I just get a flashing cursor and it doesn't load (so I cant see the physical drives, or the Arrays etc)

Thanks

 

[pricklypunter]

You didn't mention what kind of raid setup. Is this the inbuilt thing running from the mainboard options? Is it running from an actual raid card? Or is this software based like mdadm? What size is the array? If it's not too large and the data is important, I would be backing that up to an external disk, or disks, right now before it all goes south

 

[symbiosis]

Thankfully, it finished rebuilding today and now all seems fine - phew

 

[pricklypunter]

Unless your data is of the "throw away" variety, I strongly suggest that you back up what you've got and migrate away from Raid5 altogether. Disk sizes being what they are now, rebuild times are awful and it all goes pooooof if anything else fails during that time period, it's a risk that you can mitigate. Also, don't forget that there's no substitute for a good back-up plan, for when things go sideways and the array is toast. Raid5 had it's place in history, but there's very little good use cases for it now, better with something much more robust