Tony Barrett,

Just to confirm are the part numbers on the failed drive and the replacement the same? Also, when you have the replacement in the server and are in OMSA, under Physical Disks, does it show the drive as missing, failed, or is it just not even present at all? Are the test drive showing, or not showing the same results as well. 

Lastly, do you have a known good SAS cables from another R610 you can swap out with to test? Just to make certain.

Let me know what you see.

Thanks for the reply.

The part numbers are identical, but from past experience, that shouldn't make any difference. The server should detect the disk, and as long as it's compatible, it should work. The server currently shows nothing for disk entry 0:0:2 (the physical disk number), but it does show the virtual (RAID1) disk as 'degraded'.

If I expand Connector 0 / Enclosure / Physical Disks all I see are 0:0:0, 0:0:1 and 0:0:3. There's no entry at all for 0:0:2. This particular RAID1 volume consists of 0:0:2 and 0:0:3. There's another RAID1 consisting of 0:0:0 and 0:0:1. Disks 0:0:4 and 0:0:5 (another RAID1) are working fine on Connector 1.

As this is a shared backplane, and the other 5 disks are working fine, what difference will replacing the SAS cables make? I also don't think I have any spare R610 SAS cables anywaym unfortunately.

I was asking so if the part numbers were different I could check compatibility on the replacement, if need be.  Just to clarify, is it the SAS6/ir you have installed, or the Perc6/i? The reason I ask is the SAS6/ir only allows for 2 Virtual Disks. If you do have the Perc 6/i what is the driver and firmware showing as? With the cables, I was just trying to rule that out before saying the issue may be the slot. 

Thanks again.

The model number of the failed disk (and the identical replacement disk) is ST973402SS (Seagate Savvio 10K.2). I know Dell re-badge these (or did), but I don't know the Dell P/N unfortunately.

I can confirm that the controller is definitely a SAS6/iR, and yes, I'm aware that this controller only supports 2 VD's max. The extra drives we added a while back in slots 0:0:4 and 0:0:5 are in JBOD mode managed in a RAID 1 by the O/S.

FYI, what we do notice in the OMSA system logs is that when we hot plug the disk into the slot, a log entry is made. We see the messages 'Drive 2 is removed...' and 'Drive 2 is installed...', so the hardware is seeing the disk change, but just not actually making the disk available for use, or even visible in OMSA or the CLI.

I'm assuming nobody is going to reply to this thread now, and it will slowly die. I've seen this happen many times when posts reach a dead-end.

I still have the problem, and no explanation for it. I don't believe it's a faulty slot (why would the server 'see' the disk change then in the OMSA logs?). All other drives on the same connector work fine, and it's almost certainly not the SAS cable from the disk backplane to the motherboard.

TonyBarrett,

It sounds like the replacement drive may have a foreign configuration on it, which isn't allowing it to be discovered. Try this. 

• Stop and Restart the OpenManage services (initial discovery at startup will identify the foreign drive)
• Clear the foreign configuration under Storage - SAS6/ir in OMSA.
• Verify drive is discovered and visible in Physical Disks.
• Start the rebuild if it is seen.

Let me know.