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Hello everyone,
we have a SC2020 that went into "emergency mode" or more exactly "hostage mode" since nothing gets in or out before solving the conflict.
After some debating we may as well sacrifice the hostages in order to regain control.
So my question is if there's a way to just reset everyting and start over since the unit is out of warranty and we do not want to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to support just for this.
First of all we cannot get out from emergency mode because we do not have any room to add more disks.
We tried deleting the volume but we are not able as it always tries to send it to the recycle bin (even if we check the option NOT to do it)
We tried to reset to the factory settings but that doesn's work nither because some cache issue. It seems cache is also locked.
So, as we have physical access to it, we were thinking of just reset it (if there even is such an option). Anyone already did this or has any other method of reusing the SAN?
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Posted May 6th, 2022 13:00
Hi,
Unfortunately, the commands to clear everything require phone support. In addition to the steps you have tried are there any replications that you can stop? Are there any snapshots that you can expire? Is there only 1 pagepool? Is there any free space on the existing disks that is not allocated and can be?
Let us know if you have any additional questions.
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Posted May 9th, 2022 14:00
Hello Josh,
thanks for your reply, no, no free space, no extra disk space, we have only one volume that we're trying to delete. Basicaly, everyting that is in the "How to exit emergency mode" procedure was tried. Now we have tried to destroy the data/volume by removing more disks than the array can handle.
I do not want to believe that dell would keep a "secret formula" so only they can unlock those situations so i'm still hoping1781
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Posted May 9th, 2022 20:00
Hi @itsibitsi,
A couple of things to check to get out from emergency mode, but I don't a good way without contacting support, as some steps, if done wrong, may occur data lost. Something related to pagepool. Also, clearing the configuration would need supports intervene, hence, contacting support would be the best thing to do.
DELL-Joey C
Social Media and Communities Professional
Dell Technologies | Enterprise Support Services
#IWork4Dell
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Posted May 11th, 2022 06:00
Thanks, i understand support is able to help, that's why they are payed for, however as it is an out of warranty unit, we do not need any data that's on the unit currently and we do not want to pay again for support (which doesn't come cheap).
Do you know if we can find the documentation somewhere so we can handle this without support? Otherwise this SAN is just bricked, we can throw it away without the support. Does not encourage us to buy from Dell anymore....
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Posted May 11th, 2022 08:00
Hello itsibitsi,
Since Emergency mode is preventing other operations, including factory reset, I'd recommend troubleshoot that first.
Storage Center Alert: How to troubleshoot Emergency Mode
Emergency Mode
Reset a Controller to Factory Default
If none of that helps, or you have already done them, then you should call into support, as mentioned already, and open a support case for an engineer to do a remote session with you to work through doing this. It's possible you could lose your license if done incorrectly. Ask if 'Post Standard Support' or 'Pay As You Need' contract are available to you.
DELL-Charles R
Social Media and Communities Professional
Dell Technologies | Enterprise Support Services
#IWork4Dell
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Posted May 13th, 2022 12:00
ok, thank you , i'll look into that to see what has been done and what hasn't.
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Posted May 28th, 2022 23:00
I can do it by remotely.
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Posted May 31st, 2022 11:00
Thank you tinchou, however i cannot grant you access to our servers. Is there a chance you could put the information here ? might be others with same issue.
Another piece of information is that although i cannot find ANY snapshot related menu, i can see large snapshot overhead. So i'm curious, if this is reserved space for snapshots how can we modify it, or if it's really occupied by snapshots, how can we expire them?
The documentation is a bit confusing. For deleting snapshots it's talking about dell collector+ Unisphere Central, however when i go to the downloads of this SC2020 unit i see only Storage manager offered which has a totaly different menu than the one i see.621
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Posted May 31st, 2022 14:00
Try using the command Grant-ClusterAccess -User [username] -Full
Also make sure powershell is being run as an administrator.
itsibitsi
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Posted June 3rd, 2022 06:00
Well, somehow we managed to get out of the Emergency mode and delete the volume.
Every move we made generated a cache flush error so it wasn't working. We saw we had some space occupide by snapshots however no menu or commandlet to view and delete those snapshots.
Unable to delete possible snapshots
Unable to delete volume
Unable to extend volume
Unable to reset to factory defaults
Solution ?
we took out all the disks (os wasn't working anymore) and reconnected them after a while in the same order, so no swapping.
After this, as we had another 6TB marked as free space, we were able to use the Expand-SCVolume command (maybe at this point the GUI would have worked also) to add it to he volume which despite an error worked, or at least we din not had the Emergency mode shown anymore.
We forced a reboot because it seemed the expand worked only half way and after that we were able to delete the volume.
So in the end not happy at all with this Dell Emergency mode/hostage mode. Very frustrating as the solutions given by dell did not worked in their own OS...