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Rebuild Possible in PERC S100 S300 w/o Open Manage?
We have a T110 running RAID5 with 3 drives. For whatever reason, one of the drives died and I am running a degraded array. The HUGE problem I have, after speaking with elevated tech support, is that the S300 controller does NOT support a rebuild from within its BIOS. It can ONLY be done through Dell Open Manage. However, the system we are running is a custom PoS install and it has some issues that prevent Open Manage from launching. Is there ANY way to rebuild the array with a new drive in the BIOS w/o using Open Manage? Or alternatively, can anyone help me get OpenManage to launch properly? Spent an hour w/ Dell Tech Support and they failed to get it to work. Being close to 1 a.m., I told them I would call them back in a day to see if I make progress.
Issue 1: Unable to launch Open Manage Admin
Description: When laughing OMA, it launches web browser (Tried both FF and IE), and https://server:1311 will not load (page not found). Changing "server" to the actual IP of the server yields the same problem. They did all kinds of stuff to the security settings but could not get it to launch.
Issue 2: Unable to rebuild within PERC S300 BIOS
Description: I do not see a rebuild menu item in the BIOS. Would it be appropriate to simply select "add hot global spare" and then select the new drive as such and let it reboot and see if it rebuilds? Or would that only cause the 2 remaining drives to rebuild to that if 1 of the remaining 2 die?
Probably Solution?
Description: Is there ANY software out there that I can use to image the existing Windows 2K3 RAID5 setup onto an external HD, re-setup the RAID5 in the server, and image it back?
DELL-Chris H
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February 20th, 2013 06:00
HTC2010,
When you initiated a rebuild from the BIOS, it doesn't start till the driver loads, so you won't see it from within the BIOS.
You can assign the drive as a hotspare and it will rebuild in place of the failed drive. It won't cause the other 2 drives any issues.
Let me know how it goes.
htc2010
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February 20th, 2013 07:00
When I assign the new drive as a global hot spare, do I do that while the old drive is still in the system or should I power down, swap the failed drive, and then enable it as the spare?
DELL-Chris H
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February 20th, 2013 09:00
You can either way. Then when the drive is out of the array it will rebuild with the HS, after loading the driver.
htc2010
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February 20th, 2013 09:00
I hope this is not too poor of a question, but this hardware setup is very new to me. So when you mean, "after loading the driver," is that to say that when I assign the global hot spare, and am booted back into Windows, the driver currently installed will initiate the process? Currently, the array only shows as "Dell PERC S100/S300 SCSI Disk Device" in Device Manager. Is that all that is required or do I need a utility installed into Windows for it to work?
htc2010
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February 20th, 2013 21:00
After hours, I removed the failed hard drive from the array. I went into the PERC BIOS to initialize the replacement drive and assigned it as a hot global spare. At that point, I do not see any options in the BIOS to rebuild the virtual disk. I went on to reboot the system. Currently, I am able to boot back into Windows but when I restart, it still shows the array as "degraded." How do I verify that the hot global spare is being rebuilt, and am I missing any steps? Windows Server is back up, but I cannot see "under the hood." Dell Open Manage just won't run given our existing configuration, so we are kind of handicapped. Your thoughts are much appreciated.
DELL-Chris H
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February 21st, 2013 05:00
What you can try is running a DSET report on the server. It is a reporting tool that displays not to unlike OMSA would.
Dset - www.dell.com/.../poweredge-t110
The report is created on the desktop. Let me know how it goes.
htc2010
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February 21st, 2013 08:00
Ah, the problem has been solved. I was finally able to install and run Open Manage. The original problem with Open Manage was that when Pro Support went through the installation, we were doing a shared remote desktop screen through a terminal session. Last night, I went in and tried installing Open Manage directly at the server, and that allowed us to run the diagnostic, and ensure that the new drive is properly rebuilding.
But to further address the original question of being able to rebuild the array without Open Manage, it looks like using the global spare was correct as well. After I added the new drive as the global hot spare and rebooted, I noticed hard drive activity was high, non-stop. After successfully loading Open Manage, I was able to verify that indeed the array was being rebuilt.