PowerEdge R410 does not detect new hard drive

Hi,

What RAID controller are you using? How were the drives configured? Was it a RAID 5?

It doesn’t look like it is seeing the drive in the OS, do you have Openmanage server administrator installed? Can you reboot? The new drive might be in a foreign state and needs to have the state cleared.

Sorry it took so long!

Two partitions: one RAID1 , the other RAID5; the first one for / and the RAID5 one for /home/ files. This is what cat /proc/mdstat gives me:

md127 : active raid5 sdb3[2] sda3[3]
      3697044480 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [U_U]

md0 : active raid1 sda1[3] sdb1[2]
      102399928 blocks super 1.0 [3/2] [UU_]
      bitmap: 1/1 pages [4KB], 65536KB chunk

unused devices:

The third drive was, originally, on sdc. Now lsscsi just returnss (with the new drive in there):

[0:2:0:0]    disk    DELL     PERC 6/i Adapter 1.22  /dev/sda
[0:2:2:0]    disk    DELL     PERC 6/i Adapter 1.22  /dev/sdb

PS: I didn't set these up; inherited the whole thing from the previous netadmin...

Reboot, go into the ctrl+R for the PERC6. Press ctrl+N to go to PD mgmt., what is the state of the drive?

Aha--this is more like it. :)

However: it sees 2 Seagate drives, with status "Online" and a Toshiba CD/CVD with status "Ready". Third drive is not seen,

Can you try the drive in another slot? It could also be an issue with the replacement. If it isn’t showing up here the controller is not detecting the drive

Are there multiple screw holes on the hard drive carrier? Some carriers had two sets of holes and the drive doesn’t fully engage with the backplane if it is in the wrong set.

Oh, wow. I didn't realize that there was a spare slot on the server. I plugged the drive in it; again, the green light is on, but nothing is being detected. I'll reboot and see if the BIOS sees it.

The drive is brand new, and specifically says that it is compatible with PowerEdge 410--besides the possibility of *** hardware, what else could cause this?

Exactly--the OS is not recognizing it, even though the server itself appears to (the green light is on). I rebooted the server--but no luck; still only sees sda and sdb drives.

PS: there is one error displayed at the server itself, but I think it has to do with the UPS power loss earlier.

Thanks, I think you are on the right track: we'd already failed and removed the bad drive, but the system was not coming up with just the two (not sure why), so I restarted it from CD and just added the two drives with mdadm. So it is not degraded at the moment; it thinks that the two drives is all it needs.

The question is, is there an easy way to add the new drive to it? I thought that just copying the partition table with sfdisk would be the proper first step, and then rebuilding the array with mdadm--but I need the system to actually recognize the new drive on the OS level to do that.

If you are using mdadm to set up the raid at the software level you need to create a single drive raid 0 at the hardware level so that the OS can see it, The PERC 6 does not have a nonraid mode, so it probably was configured as three separate raid 0s and OS level raid 5.

It came preloaded into a caddy already--I can check, but, like I said, it is now recognized in the BIOS but not by the OS.

Thanks! This is making more sense now. I will mess with it--perhaps I'll have to boot it from CD again and restore previous RAID settings. I'll let you know the results...or lack of them...as soon as I am done.

Thanks for your help! Living and learning here...

OK, I rebooted it--and it shows up in the BIOS now, with "Ready" state". But once booted, lsscsi does not show it, and trying to sfdisk to it returns "sfdisk: Fatal error: cannot find /dev/sdc"

Ready means that it is not being used or part of an array, are the other drives in an online state? Under VD mgmt. in the controller does it show the virtual disk being degraded?