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Does a battery failure in a RAID Controller prevent the controller from working?
I've search online for answers but it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in cases like this.
We've had this Powervault for 3.5 years now and one of the raid controllers (MD36 series- Reg Model: E02M ) has stopped working with the battery light/LED on in the backpanel.
Will a non-functioning battery in the raid controller cause the RAID controller to stop functioning?
Is there a more definitive method of determining the underlying cause of this RAID controller going south?
Obviously the fantasy would be to just change the battery and be back up but I'm starting to fear it would require some configuration if the firmware has been wiped?
Any insight?
DELL-Sam L
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May 7th, 2018 09:00
Hello catfishes,
In most cases when a raid controller battery dies you will lose the ability to have write cache. If the controller is offline, then will need to look at the Recovery Guru to see what is the listed errors. Also, if you have the serial cable that came with your MD3600 then you can connect the serial cable to the non-working controller and capture the boot up of the controller so that we can see what errors or lockdown state the controller is in. You can replace the controller battery, & the controller and the configuration will be copied from your working controller.
Please let us know if you have any other questions.
klimon
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January 31st, 2019 22:00
Can a defective battery somehow corrupt the SD card on the RAID controller? I have a Dell MD3200 with two RAID controllers. Controller 0 cannot mount. I did a serial port text capture and it shows how it hangs during the boot process with an error cannot load from SD card? Can I simply copy the contents from the working controller SD card? If so how do I make a copy of the working SD card? See text capture below....
-=<###>=-
Instantiating /ram as rawFs, device = 0x1
Formatting /ram for DOSFS
Instantiating /ram as rawFs, device = 0x1
Formatting...Retrieved old volume params with %38 confidence:
Volume Parameters: FAT type: FAT32, sectors per cluster 0
0 FAT copies, 0 clusters, 0 sectors per FAT
Sectors reserved 0, hidden 0, FAT sectors 0
Root dir entries 0, sysId (null) , serial number 10000
Label:" " ...
Disk with 1024 sectors of 512 bytes will be formatted with:
Volume Parameters: FAT type: FAT12, sectors per cluster 1
2 FAT copies, 1010 clusters, 3 sectors per FAT
Sectors reserved 1, hidden 0, FAT sectors 6
Root dir entries 112, sysId VXDOS12 , serial number 10000
Label:" " ...
RTC Error: Real-time clock device is not working
OK.
Adding 14630 symbols for standalone.
Reset, Power-Up Diagnostics - Loop 1 of 1
3600 Processor DRAM
01 Data lines Passed
02 Address lines Passed
3300 NVSRAM
01 Data lines Passed
4410 Ethernet 82574 1
01 Register read Passed
02 Register address lines Passed
6D40 Bobcat
02 Flash Test Passed
3700 PLB SRAM
01 Data lines Passed
02 Address lines Passed
6D50 LSISAS2008 IOC 1
01 Register Read Test Passed
02 Register Address Lines Test Passed
03 Register Data Lines Test Passed
3900 Real-Time Clock
01 RT Clock Tick Passed
Diagnostic Manager exited normally.
eth0: LinkUp event
01/31/19-22:51:12 (tNetCfgInit): NOTE: Network Ready
Bad File CRC after decompression
ld(): error loading file (errno = 0x610001).
shellLib: the current task is not a shell task and there is not any shell task running on the console.
Kernel initialization complete
Current date: 01/31/19 time: 12:48:19
DELL-Sam L
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February 1st, 2019 07:00
Hello klimon,
You can replace the SD card on controller0, and then insert it back into your MD3200i, and it should write the configuration from controller 1 to your SD card. I would let it sit for about 15 minutes before you online the controller0 so that the configuration can be copied over. In some rare case you have to copy the configuration from the SD card and manually copy to the new SD card.
Please let us know if you have any other questions.
klimon
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February 18th, 2019 02:00
Can you recommend a utility for copying the SD card?
DELL-Sam L
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February 18th, 2019 09:00
Hello klimon,
If you connect your serial cable you should be able to see the configuration being copied to the replacement controller. Once the copy has finished you will see in the serial shell that the controller will reboot & the it will display as ready. Once it is shown as ready then you can online the controller.
Please let us know if you have any other questions.