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P2950 Appropriate Diagnostic Utilities and methodology to run
Hi there:
I have a P2950 with no OS installed and no floppy drive. I am getting intermittent disk drive errors when I try to build an array. before I start ripping stuff out (backplane?), I want to run one of the dignostic utilities that will self install and run w/out an OS (Windows).
What utility should I download?
Can I download to an x86 32 bit workstation so I ?
What do I need to do to burn it onto a DVD so that it will self-run on boot?
Anonymous
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274.2K Posts
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June 3rd, 2011 09:00
There are some different diagnostic options.
The first would be the 32 bit diagnostics. 32 Bit Diagnostics download: ftp.us.dell.com/.../DELL_32-BIT-DIAGNOSTICS_5118-3_R212797.exe
Run on a workstation to generate the media in which you want to boot the diagnostic program to in order to run any tests
The other option is to use our OpenManage Live disk. It’s a custom version of CentOS. Download and burn the ISO, boot to it and it will load up a desktop in which you can run OpenManage to investigate any system issues, view hardware log etc. From here, you can also run diagnostics on the unit.
OpenManage Live: http://linux.dell.com/files/openmanage-contributions/omsa-64-live/OMSA64-CentOS55-x86_64-LiveCD.iso
With the drive errors, do you have any drives in a SMART failure? You could try creating independent RAID 0s arrays, initialize and see if you can isolate the drive as well should diagnostics not pinpoint the issue.
mcolman
161 Posts
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June 13th, 2011 12:00
Hi everyone:
Thanks for the responses. I figured it out myself. I had an orphan RAID1 drive in each of the #2 drive slots on both machines and the raid bios didn't like it. I went into the PERC5/di and under the foreign config option, I erased the drive info, rebooted, created the VD, initialized, and everything was fine.
theflash1932
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June 3rd, 2011 09:00
Are you using "certified" (Dell co-branded) drives, or at least enterprise-class drives? Are you creating the array using the default array settings - and checking the Advanced/Initialize options?
theflash1932
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June 3rd, 2011 09:00
32-bit Diagnostics will test the system (including drives) outside of the OS, from bootable media:
This software you will download and run on a workstation (x86/x64) to create the bootable media (USB, CD). It includes software to actually burn the image to the CD, so you just need a CD burner on your workstation.