A customer called me because there were an allert in his BLade S, so, after a check I saw two disks in PFA state.
As normal i called IBM (ops Lenovo!) to activate the on site support.. some hours later the Lenovo engeneer is arrived to replace the PFA’s drives.
In this case, I tooke some screenshots becouse it was interesting the metod becouse, he used the copy-back operation that means the use of an empty drive to switch from one drive in PFA an a ne one, in our case the hotsphare drives (it was changed from hot-s to free).
Our body of evidence, an old Blade-S.
![](http://marcoschiavon.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/7AC25695-09E3-4B9B-903F-01FE7C41B4F3.jpg)
the problems…
![](http://marcoschiavon.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Screen-Shot-2018-07-05-at-14.53.06.jpg)
The free drives that he used (drive 0) and drives in PFA 3 and 6 :
the command : List drive
![](http://marcoschiavon.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Screen-Shot-2018-07-05-at-14.53.29.jpg)
the magic command to lunch the copy back from the first drive , 1:4 that is the number 3 to the free one , the 0 (1:1).
the command:copyback -source 1:4 -dest 1:1
![](http://marcoschiavon.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Screen-Shot-2018-07-05-at-14.53.54.jpg)
now the command to have a state of the task..
the command: view long running task
![](http://marcoschiavon.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Screen-Shot-2018-07-05-at-14.54.20.jpg)
after 3 hours…
![](http://marcoschiavon.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Screen-Shot-2018-07-05-at-14.54.44.jpg)
at the end, he replaced the drive 3, and insert a new one that at this point , become the free one in our console. he started a new copy back task for the disk 6.
Very interesting!