Boot issue PowerEdge sc1420 : BIOS Not Installed and RAID issue

What cards are installed and how many disks as only one is showing from the above list and is shown as degraded which normally means an error with the raid set.. You should not have a tape drive attached to a raid controller, it's not supported and can cause all sorts of errors.

If you have your disks attached to a plug in card then the onboard raid should be turned off, as well as the sata ports. Change the setting for floppy as well to not installed. Turning off un-used ports should get you past the F1 prompt.

Yes, as the bios can't detect a sata device attached it stops at the F1 prompt allowing you to enter the bios and check things out. So turning them off tells the bios nothing is installed and it can carry on.

Raid - The message:

Slot Ch ID LUN Vendor        Product              Size  Bus  Status Cache

05  A  1    0   SEAGATE     ST373207LW 0         73GB   16          OFF

Is showing the raid conroller is only seeing one disk attached at ID1, it's a good bet that a disk has failed.

When you get the message press ctrl-A for raid config, do so and have a look round, you can use the mneus to navigate the options. I can't remember the layout of the screens but as long as you press esc to exit a screen you should be safe having a look.

Thank you for your answer.

A disk may have fail because when i installed my OS i tried to partition the disk and it failed, i could only partition one of them.

Maybe i should open the server box and check if everything is ok with the disks (plugged correctly).

Otherwise, when i press Ctrl+A i see a screen with 4 lines and i can select the one i want to configure it but i don't understand what the lines mean. Here they are:

- 39320 A at slot 05 03:0C:00

- 39320 B at slot 05 03:0C:01

- 39320 A at slot 04 03:0C:00

- 39320 B at slot 04 03:0C:01

When i select one of these options i have a screen with 3 options:

- Configure/View SCSI Controller Settings

- Configure/View HostRAID Settings

- SCSI Disk Utilities

What should i do and what should i check ?

Thank you for your help and your patience

you want 39320 A at slot 05, select configure/view hostraid setting. There should be more options. Here are some links to get you further.

Storage manager software: www.adaptec.com/.../productid=asc-39320a-r&dn=adaptec+scsi+card+39320a-r.html

User guide: www.adaptec.com/.../ultra320_ug_en_pdf.htm

As i've said i have very little knowledge of this card, maybe some of the others will start chipping in.

I have 2 disks (i can see them in my Debian).

A disk may have fail because when i installed my OS i tried to partition the disk and it failed, i could only partition one of them.

This RAID primer may be worth a read as it will give you some background on RAID technology and terminology. Basically when you are using a raid solution, the physical hard disk drives are abstracted from the operating system. As such, you need to configure the physical hard drives connected to your raid card as logical drives that the raid controller presents (or makes available) to your operating system (his configuration is usually done prior to an operating system install).

Because redundancy and availability is a primary reason for using RAID, any physical drive faults are managed by the controller (where possible). As such, the operating system still sees a working logical volume. Also, when you perform partitioning or formatting within the operating system, you only act on the logical volume and not on the physical hard drives themselves (thus seeing 2 HDD within Debian or having partitioning issues may not be as telling as you think).

I'm not familiar with the CERC raid controller or your system and I'm still learning about servers myself, but it would be worth viewing the "controller settings" and the "host/raid settings" as somewhere in these settings you should see what type of RAID setup you have and thus how many HDD are involved in your configuration. Knowing what internal hardware should exist and how it is connected up is worth an investigation. As "tommo" said, having a tape drive attached to the raid card is asking for problems. See the system information manual which may help you to better understand your hardware.

Post the screen shots of the settings here some detail of how the hardware is physically connected within the system case and others would be able to make better suggestions that me :emotion-1:

The tape drive may not be a problem, it states that if a scsi tape drive is used a 2nd 39320 must be installed and the drive connected to that. From the info above there are 2x cards installed. So disks should be cabled to one and the tape drive to the other.

Finally found a Dell manual for the 39320 card: