Surface analysus on Smart Array?

[Bill Faulk]

I swear I saw an option on the Compaq diagnostics from the F10 partition that allowed a surface analysis on SCSI disks attached to my Smart Array 3200. The first time I ran the diagnostics I saw an option somewhere for running a surface analysis and it showed both logical disks on the array. The card is a Smart Array 3200 and I'm using SmartStart 5.5. Now I can't find the option anywhere. The server diagnostics from the floppy or F10 partition only recognize the internal scsi ports but not the smart array. If I hook disks up to the internal scsi I can vertify/random test the disks but I don't think that's an actual surface analysis which could remap bad sectors. I just purchased 10 used disks and want to check them.

Is there an option with any of the boot utilities or SmartStart utilities to perform a surface analysis on the configured disk arrays? Dang if I can find one. Is the only option to run scandisk under windows?

Thanks for any help!

[Bill Faulk]

Eh, well I just realized I can't edit messages to fix typos. :-\

[Roy Main]

You probably did see it depending on which version of diags you were running. If you have upgraded recently - it is probably no longer there.

If it is the old dos-based diags try this: press ctrl-a at the system partition menu before you actually choose the diagnostics choice - this starts "advanced" mode and the surface scan will appear.

There is a pop up box to tell you that you have triggered advanced mode. As for which versions of diags have and dont have surface analysis - i dont know for sure. But the trend lately has been to remove any potentially data destructive features.

[Bill Faulk]

The Control-A option is good to know in general but I can't even to the basic tests on the Smart Array 3200 because it doesn't show in the list of devices. The onboard scsi shows as does a Smart Array 431. I tried this on multiple Proliant 1850 or 5500 servers with different SA3200 controllers and had the same problem. I'm using SmartStart 5.5 and server diagnostics S11.05A. I tried the diagnostics from both a diskette and F10 partition with identical results. I never had older diagnostics although I suppose I could try older diagnostics and try it but the diagnostics I used are of the appropriate generation.

[Bill Faulk]

In case anyone else has this problem I have an answer. The last server diagnostics version to support the Smart Array 3200 was S11.02B (7 Jun 2002). I made a boot floppy with this version and can test disks on a SA3200 controller with it.

The S11.02 server diagnostics may be found here for anyone else who wants this:

http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/14740.html