Perc 4/SC hangs when deleting Virtual/Logical Disk

John,

I checked in the Perc Bios (Ctr-M) and verified the drives.  They were tagged A00-00 and A00-01 for virtual disk 0 and A01-00 for virtual disk 1.  I tried initializing Virtual Disk 1 from the Array Manager and the whole system frooze again.  The server is a PowerEdge 1600SC.  Any other ideas?  There is absolutely no data on Virtual Disk 1 so I don't care what we do to it.  Virtual Disk 0 on the other hand I need it in-tacked.

 

Thanks,

Ara

Check in the Perc Bios (Ctrl-M).  In the management menu>>Objects>> Physical drives, there should be two drives tagged A00-00 and A00-01, these are your mirrored drives, virtual disk 0. There should also be another drive tagged A01-00 which should be the one drive Raid 0, virtual disk 1. Boot the server into the operating system and go into array manager. If you do not care about the data on virtual disk 1, try right clicking on Virtual disk 1 and try to initialize it. After it is initialized, then try deleting it. If successful, that third drive should be available to be assigned as a global hotspare.

I suspect that the hard drive may be bad. Try going into the bios of the perc controller (Cntrl-M). In the bios, try to highlight the drive and press F2 to get some drive information. Also try pressing enter on the drive and forcing it off-line. If it does not respond, shut the server down and try placing the drive in another slot and again try to get it to respond in the bios. If it will not respond, the drive is bad. Pull the drive and you should be able to delete the virtual disk in the bios.

 wanna hear something funny? I can't delete the darn virtual disk 1.  So I decided to try to use it, so I kept it and partitioned it from windows 2003 server and am using it as a backup drive and it works great.   But still can't delete it lol.  I still rather have it as a hotspare.

 

 

 

 

John,

The hard drive does successfully go offline and online when forced.  I even tried switching it from id:3 to id:2.  The hard drive responds very well.  I tried deleting the virtual disk even with the hard drive pulled out.  I waited 10 mins and it was still on the same screen on the bios.  Nothing responding other than the caps lock and num lock when trying to delete it.  I am very confused.....

Could it be a corrupted bios settings on the raid? is it possible to reset the raid controller back to factory settings and then add my virtual disk 0 without loosing the data on it?

 

Thanks,

In Array Manager, right click on the PERC controller, go to properties and see what firmware version it shows for the controller. Also, can you tell me the version of array manager?

Perc 4/SC 3.50O / 6.41.2.32

Array Manager 3.6.0 (build 568.5)

Forcing the drive offline in the bios and going into array manager will not let you delete the virtual disk?  See if the PERC Bios has an option to Format the hard drive or Clear data on the drive.  Another recommendation would be to call into tech support.  There is a way to clear the raid configuration on the controller, "retag" the raid 5 disks(virtual disk 0) but not the one drive raid 0 (virtual disk 1).  But this is something that should probably be handled on the phone.