Proliant 6500 and Smart Array 221

[Brent Blayney]

I have purchased a used Proliant 6500 and plan on installing SME6.0b2 on it. I have 5 4.3GB hot-swappable Compaq SCSI drives in it now, and I would like to run a RAID5 array, so I also purchased a Smart Array 221 for it. Unfortunately, I do not have any of the drivers, installation disks or utilities for either piece of hardware and therefore I cannot seem to get the Smart Array 221 to work properly. It will locate the first disk properly, but not the others. When I try to run the System Utilities (which I downloaded,) it keeps stating that it cannot find a fixed disk in the system. It also keeps prompting me for diskettes I do not have and cannot find online.

Any suggestions on how best to get this running? I'm remarkably green on SCSI technology and setting up machines of this nature in general, so I'm having trouble figuring out what to look for and what to try.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!!

[Forum User_1]

You need to configure an array first. It will then see all the disks as one physical disk. To configure the array on a 221, you need the Array Configuration Utility. Without a SmartStart CD, I'm not sure how you would go about doing this. It's a Windows-based proagram, but runs from a Mini-windows GUI.

Call Support and tell them what's happening and they should be able to send you a SmartStart 5.5 CD (you cannot use 6.x with that server).

[Brent Blayney]

Jeff,

This is exactly what I've done. I spoke with someone at tech support who informed me that I needed SmartStart 5.5 so I have ordered that. I was dismayed to find out that while the CD itself only cost $21, they were going to charge me $20 for ground shipping to Canada!! Now I have to wait 7 - 10 days for the CD and cannot do much with my machine until it arrives.

Also, I will not be running Windows on this machine, but I understand that this will not affect the usefullness of the SmartStart CD.