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Problems Setting Up RAID - Dell R530 & Perc H730P Mini
I have bought 3 second hand Dell PowerEdge R530s, each with a Perc H730P Mini all with no disks.
As these are second hand they are out of warranty and without Dell support. All firmware is up to date. RAID batteries are good.
I also have bought a set of 4TB SAS drives. Seagate Constellation ES.3 6GB/s.
I am having real problems with setting up RAID I have tried various ways of doing this, the array seems to be created fine and all disks showing steady green/green lights and RAID shown OK in the RAID setup.
But as soon as I try and use it, for example to install an OS I get IO errors and all the disks in the raid start flashing orange with steady green.
I have tried swapping disks around and swapping Perc H730P Mini cards and this does not fix the issue.
I have tried set up all 8 disks as RAID 60 - fails immediately when I try to install an OS.
I am able to set up a single disk as RAID 0 and that works fine so the disks are OK.
In the last attempt I set up a single RAID0 disk with a working OS and that worked OK, then I installed 7 more drives set up as RAID50 with a hot-spare, the RAID50 array builds and reports good in the RAID config. But as soon as I mount the RAID 50 array to use it, I get IO errors and the disks in the array are all flashing orange with steady green again. Going into RAID setup shows a “Foreign” RAID.
Now I can’t even boot as I can’t get past the “One or more boot drivers require configuration change” – even when I clear the “Foreign” configuration and set up all but the RAID0 disk as “Non-RAID” it still comes up with “One or more boot drivers require configuration change” and I can’t get past this, I will probably need to wipe all configuration and lose the working RAID0 array and the installation there.
Why am I having these problems - why are my RAID arrays failing as soon as I try to use them?
Geoff Bland
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May 24th, 2022 03:00
Erman,
Thanks for the prompt reply. When I drill down into the Perc device and show the drive details in server Setup and Lifecycle Controller it shows type and size of the drives but not model & make information. But then it does this on all the drives I have even working ones. However I have found the issues - and you were partly right about the issue being the disks.
It turns out that these disks had previously been used in a Hitachi Vantara System and have had the firmware flashed/replaced. This causes weird problems as the controller will recognise the disks and can "use" them but will fail when it tries to write to them. I am being sent replacements for these drives.
In case anyone else has similar issues you can test this as follows, using the SeaChest utilities that can be downloaded from the Seagate website.
Run the following command to get details of the drive:
This should return the correct model number, something like ST4000NM0023, and a firmware version, something like 0007 (you can check the expected firmware version on the Seagate website by entering the drive serial number here https://apps1.seagate.com/downloads/request.html).
If instead it returns a model number starting with DK and a firmware revision that does not start with a 0 then the firmware has been replaced - and the disk will not work in RAID (although may work standalone or as a single RAID0 disk).
Depending on what the disk is and what it has been flashed with it may be possible to download the disk firmware from the Seagate website and re-flash the drive back to the Seagate firmware (again use the link above to download the firmware and a flashing utility - make sure you are comfortable doing this and you understand the process or you risk bricking your disk).
Cheers
Geoff
DELL-Erman O
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May 23rd, 2022 06:00
Hi, this looks more like a non-certified drives issue. The drives are all the same and it seems they cannot communicate properly on the basis of fimrware. This causes strange behavior. When you look at the details of the drives via iDRAC or OMSA, how do they look, do details such as firmware versions and part numbers come out? Do the drives have a Dell P/N number on label them? non-Dell disks can cause problems. It may appear as a foreign disk due to a different virtual disk configuration when there was another RAID configuration before on the same drives. If this is happen after reseating drives, foreign import can also be tried.
Hope that helps!
DELL-Erman O
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May 24th, 2022 04:00
Hi Geoff, thanks for your detailed feedback. It'll be helpful for the rest of community.
Cheers,