SATA Drive woe's

Many thanks for your response.

Yes they are using the SAS screw holes.

I have even tried using a SAS 5/I controller, but still the SATA drives are not recognized.

Maybe these disks are not compatible with the PE 1950 II even though they are certified by Dell???

if you installed these in the caddies yourself, make sure the mounting screws use the SAS drive position marked on the caddy. The SATA position is for use with a interposer board and positions the drive back from the backplane.

Yes, I do get LED activity, although it is a consistent blink every second.

At the F1/F2 prompt if I remove a disk I get an E1812 HDD Removed error on LCD display

After reinserting the disk and hitting F1 the LED activity starts again, as before.

Hitting F1 just loops round to the F1/F2 prompt

On the post screen I see the below message:

0 Logical drives found on host adapter

0 Logical drives handled by BIOS

When you power on the server, do you get any led activity on the hard drives when the perc posts. The leds should flash on the disks as they're checked by the perc and spun up. Another check, once the server has posted and stopped, probably on a F1/F2 prompt. If you remove a disk wait around 1 min and then psuh it back in, you should see the disk being polled by the contoller and the led flashes. Both of previous is just to see if the controller is talking to the disks.

If there is no activity on the led's then check the cabling from the back plane to the perc.

When trying to create New VD form the No Configuration Present I get a message saying Error this configuration is not allowed, or something very similar.

During post press ctrl-R at the perc prompt to get you into the perc bios. Press Ctrl-N to advance to the next tab labelled PD  Mgmt. The disks should be listed here and show as 00:00, 00:01 and 00:02

Press Ctrl-P to return to the previous page, there should be a message under the adapter saying' No Configuration present'. Select the adapter and press F2, a box will open and select 'Create New VD', select the raid level required and the disks. Use the TAB key to navigate and the space bar to select/unselect. Other settings should be Ok as default, Tab to the OK box and enter. It will tell you to initialize the logical drive before you can use it. Do this by selecting the virtual disk and press F2 select initialization from the popup box and then right arrow to enter the properties. There are 3 options: Start init, stop int and fast init. Select fast init and follow the prompts, then exit and reboot.  If all goes well, the disk will be available to the system.

manual is here:  <ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>

The firmware is already at the latest version.

Many thanks for all your help with this.

I think I am going to have to get the SATA disks swapped for SAS.

The disks do not show at all.

one drive would be configured as a single raid 0, two disks as raid 0 or raid 1 and three disks as raid 5. On the PD Mgmt page all 3 disks should be showing as 'Ready' if showing as failed then select the disk and F2 and force online. On the VD Mgmt page select the controller and F2, make sure there are no entries under 'Foreign Configuration' if there are clear them.

When you try to create a 3disk raid 5, does the 'VD size' show roughly 1000gb?

3 SATA's

I have tried with just  one drive installed.

Still no luck......

how many disks do you have?

All i can think of. If these are new drives they will be 6gb sata. Maybe the contoller can't autonegotiate the speed down to 3gb. You could see if the firmware is up to date: www.dell.com/.../poweredge-1950

After that i'm stumped, maybe some of the other guys can offer more insight.

Update.

I tried an old 80GB MacBook hard drive and it picked it up straight away.

It would seem that the 6gb interface is not supported as you said.

Many thanks for your help Tommo.