Cannot format a disk on our HP EVA 4400 SAN from our new Dell PowerEdge M710 blade.

[glenn1179]

We cannot format a disk on our HP EVA 4400 SAN from our new Dell PowerEdge M710 blade. This blade and disks are not part of a cluster after we had the issues covered in this thread:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverClustering/thread/d8058f2c-8c86-4c20-9291-36840b21dd0d


We did a fresh format and install of W2K8 64 bit Datacenter SP2 (Full) with Hyper V on the M710 with a Qlogic QME2572 HBA. I requested one 40 GB lun from our HP EVA 4400 SAN be presented and tried to quick format it. It failed with the pop-up error, "The format did not complete successfully." I let a normal format run for 4 hours and it only completed 10%, so I cancelled it. I can’t find any entries of errors in the event logs that appear to be related. The same lun was then presented to a Dell Poweredge M600 blade in the same chassis with a Qlogic QME2472 HBA and I was able to format it from that machine in about a minute. Just for kicks I tried formatting a USB drive to NTFS on the M710 and that worked. I also tried swapping the HBA's between the M710 and M600 and I still wasn't able to format the lun from the M710. I tried updating the HBA driver on the M710 from 9.1.4.6 to 9.1.8.16 and the quick format still fails.

[Uwe Zessin]

Glenn,
what Windows version was running on the M600?
I've seen this behaviour with Windows Enterprise Edition, too. This seems to be a little bug, because EE (and I guess DC as well) does not automatically assign a drive letter and mount a new volume in some cases.

[glenn1179]

The M600 is also W2K8 64 bit Datacenter SP2 (Full) install.

[Uwe Zessin]

OK, but at that time the disk wasn't completely empty any longer, was it?

[glenn1179]

The 40 GB disk was still completely empty when presented to the M600 because it couldn't be formatted for use from the M710.

[Uwe Zessin]

Does that mean you have removed the partition table and the signature?

[glenn1179]

No, the partition table and the signature were not removed.

[glenn1179]

How does one remove the partition table and the signature on an empty lun with out destroying anything else?

[glenn1179]

This issue appears to be resolved by finding the right combination of drivers to get this to work.

[glenn1179]

Found the right drivers to get the device to work properly.