DD 990 - DD FS wont start

As you ask the question here, I imagine the dd990 is no longer under maintenance?

A dd990 is already out of standard support, so would require extended support contract?

Regardless of that, is there also any specific reason to still run an unsupported ddos 6.1 version? Even though a dd990 cannot be updated to ddos7.x, it can still run up until the latest and greatest 6.2, which might deal with the issue you are affected by, especially as it is not working at the moment? This assumes you still have access to the Dell support site to download a recent ddos 6.2 rpm? 6.2.1.40 or above is the target release for ddos 6.2, 6.2.1.70 being the latest.

But it is a dd not under contract, this would be a gamble, if not looking further what might be the cause? Then again Dell might still not even help even if the hardware is under contract until the ddos version is also within supported range again? 

Thats correct, we no longer have support contract with dell. 

Does DD990 support 6.2.x? I was under the impression that it cannot go beyond 6.1.x. 

Currently the FS wont restart even after multiple reboots and there is no hardware issue on the system. Will we be able to upgrade to 6.2.x even though the FS is not working?

To add, the reason why I ask if these models are supported is due to  it not being listed as supported systems in the release notes for 6.2.x

we have ddos 6.2.1.50 running on all of our dd990's (and pretty much all other systems, especially the ones that cannot be updated to 7.x), so that is a definite yes. might just solve your issue, can't be worse than it is now, I guess?

however it requires an Dell support site user account to be able to download that ddos 6.2 rpm.

I am not sure however if the install pre-check would check if the FS is down and would not continue if it wasn't or couldn't be started? as normally it would be enabled.

EDIT: I can't recall if your current version still enables you to use a special sequence to escape to the BASH sell on the DD, that was changed from a certain ddos 6.1 version onwards and would require escalating to Dell to get a token to be able to have them go to the BASH shell.

As you would not be able to do that without support, you would end up with a more closed down DD...

We have DD990, DD890 and DD860 in our environment. So would that be ok to upgrade all of these models?

I ran the pre-check with 6.2.x image and it ran fine with no errors but will the upgrade go through with the FS down, I am not sure. I am checking with my team to see how comfortable they are with upgrade. We are also trying to reseat the NVRAM and see if it helps since we saw some NVRAM messages in the logs. 

ddfs[12942]: ERROR: MSG-INTRNL-00001: PANIC: ddr/segstore/ss_nvram.c: ssnv_restore: 1025: Fatal Error.

When you say Bash shell are you referring to SE mode?

SE mode you go into with the priv sets e command using the serialnumber to access it.

The bash shell uses a special sequence of commands to enter into the bash shell mode, as it has linux under the hood. Used often also by Dell engineers.

So if you never used it or are unaware of it, you would not even miss it (I used it in the past to use pam_tally to unlock a locked account, while in more recent ddos versions it will only temporary lock accounts).

Thanks for clarifying. We have never used the bash shell. 

To update you, we were able to bring the FS by replacing the NVRAM although it did not show any hardware errors. We were able to upgrade 2 of our systems to 6.2.1.70 version to be at the latest supported versions. .