NAS 1000s will not boot. At least one faulty disk

[ChrisX]

I have a StorageWorks 1000s, and came in this morning to find that I could ping it, but do nothing else. One hard reboot later, and I discovered that it wouldn't boot.

After going through some of the diagnostics tests I found that Disk 0 is reporting lots of errors. All 4 drives pass the quick disk test. Drives 1, 2, and 3 pass the intermediate test.

What are my options here? I inherited the kit from a company we bought out, and have no handover for it. It had Windows 2000 Server on there. Warranty is also expired.

Surely if one drive fails, it should still be functional?

[BR764657]

Tom

We also had one of these and I must say it is the worst piece of kit I have ever come accross. The problem is that the RAID is done via the operating system not hardware and once a disk goes it jsut slows down to less than snails pace. We eventually complained to HP and got it swapped out for a 1200s. As for your immediate problem if you connect a screen and keyboard and mouse directly you can boot up and and use the startup options to rebuild or use the secondary operating ssytem boot. You should be bable to swap the disk and once swapped get it to rebuild but that takes aboout a day.

[ChrisX]

Thanks Michael.

I am in full agreement with you regarding the kit!

Yesterday I ran a bunch of tests, and essentially confirmed that the cause is the failure of disk 0.

I have a mouse and keyboard connected now, but I'm not sure about the boot up options you mention. I don't seem to get them. If I just try and boot normally I get nothing.

If I go to the inital options upon booting, I get:
F2: Invoke function menu
Space: Bypass memory test
Escape: Switch display to BIOS POST

Function menu is the option I went to to run system diagnostics, but there doesn't appear to be any recovery options in here.

As the data on there wasn't critical, management say they don't want to pay for a new disk for it, and I agree! However, it would be handy if I could copy some data off it before binning it. Is there any chance of doing that without buying a new disk?

Thanks for your time.

[BR764657]

Tom

You could jsut attach the disks to another PC and see if the data is readable and then copy it off, this is how we eventuallly wiped the disks when we got a swap out.

[ChrisX]

Just in case this is of some help to other people in this situation, I got the NAS back online and with access to all data simply by removing the faulty drive from the chassis.

Upon powering up after this, the system booted into the OS fine, and I was able to access all data on the remaining 3 drives.

Once I have copied the data off I'll be retiring this unit, but at least it is proof that the RAID5 redundancy works, even if it is odd that the system isn't smart enough to just disable the faulty drive itself.