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Clear foreign state of HDDs in PERC H730 Mini WITHOUT REBOOT
Hi,
We have dell R530 server with PERC H730 Mini. We already have one RAID 10 configured and now, we added 4 new disks and want to create second RAID 10. The disks were previously in some completely different servers also in RAID.
The iDrac shows the state of the disks as Foreign, when I do ./perccli /c0 show I get their status as "UGood"
I read something about clearing foreign configuration from controller, but when I do ./perccli /c0/fall show all I get "Couldnt find any foreign conviguration
I erased the disks using ./perccli /c0/e32/s4 start erase which completed successfully, but if i try to "set state good" "set state online" "start rebuild" or "start initialization" I always get "255 Operation not allowed"
The Operating system is ESXi 6.0, so I can work with perccli and iDrac, but I cannot reboot the server to access the other tools.
Please help, thank you very much
PedyMaster
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February 3rd, 2017 04:00
Hi, I just wanted to tell you I solved my problem (and yes, without reboot)
iDrac wont allow you to create the VD inless the disks are all green (mine were foreign), But you can do this: ./perccli /c0 add vd type=raid10 drives=32:4-7 strip=128
And even though, iDrac wont permit it and the disks are not in ready state... it still works... after this command, second VD was created, all disks were green out of the blue and all works as expected - PROBLEM SOLVED
Iam not going to ask the question why I cannot do this in iDrac, when the raid controller clearly is capable of this. Iam also not going to ask why iDrac reported the disks as foreign even though the controller through perccli said "unconfigured good" or why DELL person could not give me this advice.
I just hope this answer helps somebody else :-)
DELL-Josh Cr
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January 31st, 2017 09:00
Hi,
Does it allow you to create an array with those drives? The commands that you are getting an error on only work if an array is created.
DELL-Josh Cr
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January 31st, 2017 11:00
In that case you are probably going to need to schedule the downtime to reboot and try to clear it in the controller or find disks that would not show as foreign.
PedyMaster
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January 31st, 2017 11:00
I guess not, the iDrac wont allow me to create virtual disk (it does not list any physical drives from which to create the VD)
When I go to controller -> setup to clear foreign configuration, Iam told
"STOR018: No foreign drives detected. If the only foreign drives present are in a secured state, run a secure erase operation on the drives and retry the operation. Otherwise the operation was not successful because there are no foreign drives."
I tried to do "secureerase", but operation is unavailable for my disks so I at least tried "erase simple", but nothing happened and when I go to physical disks section, I still see state as foreign
billeuze
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March 13th, 2019 08:00
Thanks PedyMaster. This sure helped me. I inserted 2 new disks that did not show up at all in idrac - one was a pulled foreign from our other server and one was brand new. Using perccli I was able to wipe the foreign config and create a new array that included those 2 new disks. idrac still does not see the new array, but esxi does and I created a new datastore from it.
Even stranger is that before I inserted these 2 new disks, I had 2 disks of same model which correctly showed as "ready" state in idrac. My new RAID 10 array was made from these 2 "ready" disks and the 2 new ones. After creating the array, these 2 original disks still show as "ready" rather than "online" Hopefully idrac will sort itself out on next reboot but in the meantime at least now I know how I can see and manage the perc controllers through cli.