hp smart array p400 does not detect additional hard drives

[Manuela Schumann]

I have a proliant dl 185 G5 with a hp smart array p400 256 MB v.5.22. It already has a RAID 6 set up with an array consisting of 6 hard drives. I now wanted to add an additional array with an extra 6 hard drives, but none of the newly added hard drives is detected whereas the old array is still running ok.

I then saw that there is an error message during boot up. That says:

'1794-Slot 1 Drive Array Array Accelerator Battery Charge Low
Array Accelerator Posted-Write Cache is temporarily disabled
The following batteries have failed and should be replaced 1'

I do not know if this has been there for a longer time, since I have not dealt with this server before. Can anybody tell me if this error message is related to the failure of detecting the new hard drives ?

Any help would be highly appreciated.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi!

Is there any activity even on the new drives? leds light up? are they not seen in post or what do you mean with not detected?

The drives not being detected are they all on the last half (right part) of the server?

You should probably get the battery replaced but maybe a firmware/reseat of the battery/controller could get it working.

If you look in the iML log maybe you can see if this battery error has been seen before?

what if you run the ADU - does that give any help?

[Trygve Henriksen]

Do you have one or TWO cables going from the P400 to the Backplane?
(There's TWO SAS/SATA 'wide' connectors on the backplane, one for each half.)

[Manuela Schumann]

Thank you for the replies!

During boot up the LED lights on all hard drives light up. When the server is up only the LEDs of the 6 hard drives in the original array show a solid green light. The LEDs of the additional hard drives are out.

The only POST message I see when booting up the server is the '1794-Slot 1 Drive Array ...' message. There are no POST messages concerning the hard drives.

I wrote the hard drives are not detected as I cannot select them or see them in the list of available hard drives in the array utility.

The first working array consists of hard drives from bay 1,3,4,6,7,9.

We have the 12HDD model therefore it should be possible to put 12 HD in. I however did not check whether we had two SATA/SAS cables going to the backplane, but I would assume we do.

We run 64bit Ubuntu server and there are only some HP extension tools available yet. I do not believe the ADU utility is but I shall check that again. And I believe I also need these tools to view the iML log file.

[Trygve Henriksen]

That is the strangest placement of disks...

According to this page:
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12864_na/12864_na.html
that would be top and bottom slots with a gap in the middle.
(1,4,7 is top and 3,6,9 is at bottom)

I would have popped the lid on that server, just to see.

[donl]

The hpacucli utility is avalible for Ubuntu and allows one to see and add drives to an additional new array or to the existing array. I upgraded to firmware 7.22 and used this hpacucli utility to do exactly what you are refering to on a HP DL185G5. I like you so much!