Bringing a T7500 back to life

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Hello again,

the disk being now good can be just a glitch of the controller. On a different computer I was using, one of the hdd was marked bad by a different perc controller ( and the alarm would have revived a mummy )... marking it manually as good actually resulted in it working normally, and still works without issues after 2 years.

So.. glitches can happen.

About those voltage and such errors, they could all be linked to the cmos battery needing a replacement.

@imWACC0 

You do not have a boot-able OS container. Your drives are suspect at best or dying soon to be dead at worst as in the next week or day or hour.

You are 10 to 15 years past end of life end of support.

Boot fail at checkpoint "ITHR"
The cryptic error evidently references temperature monitoring
of an Intel processor. Bad CMOS battery doesnt help this it makes it worse.

These are 13 to 22 year old error messages aka the newest models were running Windows Vista 2007 and the OLDEST models were running WIN2000/XP.

DL2032 batteries are not expensive.

@mazzinia 

Hey there! Long time LOL

I agree, it maybe a false reading Who can tell.

I think the volt fail may be a USB to the monitors USB hub, mouse wire is not vary long.

@speedstep 

I'm glad that you can afford new HW. Right now, I can't even get the 2nd CPU on because I can't afford the RAM fan. Being a disabled vet on a fixed income is never fun.

And I never had a "boot-able OS container", Winblows 10 and Linux just don't like the PERC 6. Boot is on 2xSSD, RAID 0, from the motherboard controller. Everything on the PERC is data.

P.S. I've been looking around at mem fail, seems DIMM2 has a high fail rate???

@imWACC0 

Windows and Linux require mass storage driver.

Neither will see any drives until the raid container is re created and drives formatted as a single container.

After that Windows and Linux install just fine on the PERC raid array.

You have to make one of the SAS drives a single disk raid 0 before the OS will ever see it.
Requires 3 drives or more for Raid 5. Requires all drives to be initialized by the controller
BEFORE you do anything with ANY OS.

Take out all drives except 1 and init it then make a raid 0 container with single drive.  THEN try to install an OS.

You cant use SATA drives on the PERC.

MUST BE SAS Drives.

You can get sata cables and remove the perc and use the onboard INTEL AHCI controller.

@speedstep 

Yes, Win10 and RHEL (8?) (and it's kids) no longer have PERC drivers.

But that's besides the point, I knew that 2xSSD RAID 0 was going to be faster than the PERC. And because it's on a different IRQ, I could have data on the PERC and OS on the SSD and get a grater total throughput.

I don't need the info that's in the books, I can read that. I need info that can only be gained by experience. The book doesn't say: how AUX_LED is plugged in, how to test for false negatives, Ithr, previous voltage failure...

Google is not telling me much, so I come here asking who might have experience with this. Or what diagnostics (not) to run.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around Control Point and Open Systems Management. Lots of info on how to look at other systems, not much about 127.0.0.1 or which of the 30 downloads is the base program and what's a module (i.e. installation order)

@imWACC0 

precision T7500 drivers

Intel_Matrix-Storage-Manager_A15_R222842.exe

https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=cw1n9

R210509

redhat driverid 85kt7

driverid 21mty

R188265

This device driver requires the following minimum Operating System version:

Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition

Minimum PERC 5 FW package version: 5.2.1-0066
Minimum PERC 6 FW package version: 6.0.2-0002
Minimum CERC 6 FW package version: 6.0.2-0002

Many Items that don't have 10 or RHEL 8 drivers work just fine with previous drivers. There are other reasons why Fedora Core and RHEL wont work but I'm not in the free Linux support camp. There is support for everything you talk about.  Said support is not free.

The VISTA 64 bit drivers for the T7500 work fine with windows 7, 8, 10

T7500 also works fine with ubuntu 20.04.  You can live boot a 20.04 dvd to prove this for yourself without any physical hard drives on most dells from 2006 or newer.

8 and 10 have other requirements however which is why Pentium D 900 series with LAHF SAHF, CMPXCG16, etc is required.  Optiplex GX620 works with that Just Fine.

So Precision T7500 with  xeon E5620  works Just fine with Windows 7,8,10 

and VISTA WDDM 1.0 drivers.

Not supported does not mean not working.

There is equivalent driver model for Redhat and Fedora

That support is not free.

@speedstep 

Yeah, I found workarounds and Linux that do work, but it's not just out of the box. Some of it put my 15 year old CompTIA classes to a real test.

I only used RHEL as an example, because that's what the drivers are for. Linux Mint and quite a few others still support MegaRAID in the kernel.