A mathematical model of the main drive system of rolling mill is developed for the motor armature faults in the main drive system of rolling mill, taking into account the effects of nonlinear damping, friction damping between rolls and external perturbations on the system during operation. The unknown input observer is designed to process perturbations and errors as unknown inputs, and the [Formula: see text] performance index is designed to improve the robustness of the unknown input observer to fault reconfiguration. At the same time, in order to ensure the stability of the main drive system of rolling mill after the occurrence of faults, an active fault-tolerant controller is designed for the main drive system of rolling mill after obtaining the accurate fault reconfiguration value, which realizes the active fault-tolerant control of the main drive system of rolling mill. Through the simulation study on the main drive system of 2030 mm cold rolling mill stand F4, it is shown that the system is restored to the normal state after adding the fault-tolerant controller, and the motor angular speed error and roll angular speed error are 2.12% and 2.43%, respectively. Comparing with the fault-tolerant control method based on fault estimation, the root-mean-square errors of the motor angular speed and roll angular speed estimates of the designed fault-tolerant control method are reduced by 4.24% and 3.28%, respectively. Simulation verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.