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Perc 5i boots to esxi login screen after HDD replacement
I have a PE 2900 with Perc 5i. The physical drive 0, which is half of a RAID 1 virtual drive failed, amber only light. I finally located a replacement drive which when installed completed the rebuild and shows the proper configuration when viewing the RAID controller set up page. However when the server continues the boot it presents a yellow and black screen and requests a password for "root". This server has never been configured to enable ESXi (vmware) during my 5 years working here (church office). I tried the obvious "dell" and "service tag" passwords without success. I am wondering if the used replacement drive holds some residual configurations settings or something in the bios settings was inadvertently changed. How can I turn off this boot step? The unit hangs at the request for root password and only cycling power can initiate a restart. If this question has been addressed before I apologize as I thought I did a pretty thorough search without finding a solution.
Dell-DylanJ
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December 6th, 2019 09:00
It may just be that I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like the server is doing everything correctly. It's completing OS handoff to ESXi, but (as I understand it from your post) ESXi shouldn't be there at all. This would mean that the server is identifying the PERC as a boot device and the new drive as a viable boot option. If it shouldn't be there and this is a replacement disk, I would create a new initialize a new RAID volume or format the disk, depending on how you want to configure it.
volunteer99
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December 11th, 2019 10:00
Thanks for responding. Your interpretation of my original message is correct. The new (replacement) drive should not be a viable boot device. Your recommendation would format the replacement drive and then create a new raid volume. I will try this again as I thought I had already done this once. Perhaps I did it incorrectly the first time.