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pierrejamme
111 Posts
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August 20th, 2008 17:00
Where is this in the Manuals?
PE 2600 W2k3SP2. The front bezel was flashing, but none of the drives were. So I opened Server Administrator and it said disk 3 failed. It was a new SCSI hotplug in a six disk RAID 5. I opened a chat case and support told me to pull the errant disk and the replace it after a couple of minutes. The server crashed. I used BIOS as per tech to force object for disk 5 back on line, as BIOS said 3 & 5 had failed. The server came back up without disk 3. Tried rebuildig disk 3 to no avail. after trying to figure out what happened I decided that disk 3 was really disk 5. I looked through all the manuals and could not find how they are numbered. I had assumed they were top row left to right: 0, 1, 2 and bottom row left to right: 3, 4, 5. Bad assumption. I quizzed the Tech and he says they are numbered right to left.
Finally my question.
Why couldn't I find this very critical info in the manual? Or did I overlook it?
My faith in Dell has slipped I must say,
Peter
pierrejamme
111 Posts
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Posted August 25th, 2008 11:00
David,
I thought I had said nothing was blinkiing. That has been my experience.
And yes we have an excellent backup system (DPM 20070, but that server cannot be down for even a minute without users screaming.
Message Edited by pierrejamme on 08-25-2008 08:20 AMpierrejamme
111 Posts
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Posted August 25th, 2008 11:00
Snapohead,
Wow!
It is marked, who would have thunk it.
thanks,
Peter
Wow! so i
david.j.wood
145 Posts
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Posted August 25th, 2008 21:00
@pierrejamme wrote:
David,
I thought I had said nothing was blinkiing. That has been my experience.
And yes we have an excellent backup system (DPM 20070, but that server cannot be down for even a minute without users screaming.
Message Edited by pierrejamme on 08-25-2008 08:20 AM
My point was that often you can tell the controller to blink the status LED on a particular drive - the feature may be called "Identify" or similar, depending on the exact controller and drivers. If there is this feature on a storage controller, it's always wise to use it as a safeguard against pulling a good drive out of the server.
It's amazing what you can do when under stress (been there, done that, got the T shirt...).
pierrejamme
111 Posts
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Posted August 26th, 2008 11:00
David,
I was using Open Manager Server Administrator. It has an Executable called Blink and may be what you are referring to. i'll check it out. Great to learn new things.
thanks,
david.j.wood
145 Posts
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Posted August 22nd, 2008 20:00
I don't know which RAID controller you have in your 2600 (my experience is on newer hardware), but on many controllers you can set the a drive status LED to blink in an unusual pattern to identify a particular drive. This way, you can be sure you've identified the correct drive to pull.
It's also wise to have backups before starting any maintenance on drives.
It would seem wise to label the drive bays in the chassis. On the 2950 III that I have in my development rig, Dell have labelled the front of the chassis with the correct drive numbers.