3ware cards, degraded mode, and the CLI

[Dave Hayes <dave@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I use the following 3ware card on my development machine running
dragonfly 1.8.2:

twe0: <3ware Storage Controller driver ver. 1.40.01.002> port 0x1080-0x108f 
mem 0x90000000-0x907fffff,0x90841000-0x9084100f irq 11 at device 0.0 on pci4
twe0: AEN: <twe0: incomplete unit for unknown unit 1>
twe0: AEN: <twe0: degraded unit for unknown unit 1>
twe0: 2 ports, Firmware FE8S 1.05.00.068, BIOS BE7X 1.08.00.048
. ..
twed0: <Unit 1, TwinStor, Degraded> on twe0
twed0: 381553MB (781420720 sectors)

Sometimes when I reboot this machine, the simple RAID 1 array
becomes degraded (thus the above dmesg output). When I enter
the 3ware BIOS, it doesn't show the degraded disk in the menu,
so I can't rebuild it from there.

I downloaded the tw_cli but I'm unable to get it to work (it core dumps,
no surprise).

In order to fix this in the past, I've had to guess which disk 
isn't incomplete (!), dd the header, and only then would I be
able I rebuild the array from the 3ware BIOS.

So my questions are:

1) Why does this come up in degraded mode randomly? 

2) How do I get the 3ware CLI to work? OR How can I tell the 3ware
card to rebuild?

Apologies if I've asked any of this before, I'm just at the end of a
chain of wit here. 
------
Dave Hayes - Consultant - Altadena CA, USA - dave@jetcafe.org 
>>> The opinions expressed above are entirely my own <<<

Real charity doesn't care if it's tax-deductible or not.