Background:

I've had this MD3620 in production for quite a while and it's worked very well. All the drives in it were about 5-6 years old and we were ready to upgrade our test environment so I decided to use this and replace all the drives with some 1 TB drives. At this point the PowerVault was working just fine. I had all the drives sitting in array but not inserted as I was waiting for something and had planned on doing that the next day.

Turns out that night we had a circuit breaker in the UPS that was powering that MD3620 go out while all the drives were not inserted. Booting it back up and I get "client_corrupt_db_detected_on_alt." Since this is all "new" and doesn't contain any data that isn't a big deal, i can just wipe and restart. Except I can't.

What's happening:

While keeping the original RAID controllers (0M6WPW) in it, I just get that error. I try to break using Putty so I can access the shell and it doesn't work. At first it still had my management IPs but MDSM just told me the config needed to be restored and wouldn't let me do anything with it. No matter what I do, it will not break to let me enter any commands.

I also tried the SMcli and the best I was able to get was this:

I ran: SMcli.exe 10.20.60.15 -c "show storageArray healthStatus;" and that gave me:

Syntax check complete.

Executing script...

The following failures have been found:
Storage Array in Recovery Mode
Storage array: Unnamed
Failure number: 434

Script execution complete.

SMcli completed successfully.

I then tried several different attempts at clearing the config but everything either said it was an invalid command or was unable to execute because it was in lockdown mode.

Coincidentally, we have another MD3600 that uses the same cards and it had a failed card. I bought 2 replacements so I could have a spare. At first I left the top card in the problem MD3620 and then it just wrote the config the the newly inserted one and put me back at square one.

I now have the second new controller ONLY inserted and was never added alongside one of the originals. This time it boots just fine BUT I can't do anything with it. If I set it up to get a DHCP address i get a message that it's not a permanent address but it receives one and I can ping it just fine. However, I am not able to access it via the MDSM. Via the console cable I try and do a break but same thing - it won't break where I can access the cli.

Question:

How can I get this thing back online?

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