LH3000R SCSI Drives

[Mike McGuffin]

Recently I had what appeared to be a raid failure. After many days of fighting with it, I still can't assertain exactly what is wrong with my Array. Only two of the eleven disk drives will spin up completely. The other nine never fully init. The drives are 36 gb, Ultra-3, 10k, HP branded drives. I know this because the two lights for the drives stay lit and the disk activity light never goes out on the ones that don't work. I can pull the non working drives out, put them in a different server and they work fine.

I have updated all of the firmware to current on the server, blown the raid config, moved drives around, and nothing gets the non working drives to fully spin up. The two drives that do work, I can move to any slot in the hotswap on either channel and they work fine. I can also put in a new drive and it works fine. I just can't figure out what is hung up about these other nine drives.

Has anyone seen anything similar or have any suggestions?

[e4services]

Mike, What happenes if you pull the non-init. drives out one at a time and power up, firrst with 10 drives, then 9 and so on until you get all the drives to initiate. Start from either end of the cage.
We have seen this with a single bad drive or slot. When the initiation sequence reaches it, it just hangs. It causes some interfrence on the bus. as soon as it is removed all is well.

[Mike McGuffin]

I cannot get any one of the drives by itself to init in any slot with the exception of the two drives that work. I have put these two working drives in every slot to make sure the slots in the cages aren't bad. I can put any one of the non working drives in any slot and it just never will fully init.

[e4services]

But they will in another machine. That IS strange. I now would suspect the controller, but not to be sure. Or still, even though a new drive works, the backplane could have some problem. I wonder if the existing configuration on the drive could have some effect on it. Could try a lowlevel format on one of the drives, then replace it into the unit and see if it init. then

[Mike McGuffin]

I ended up pulling all but the two working drives and putting in other working drives. Rebuilt the raid with the working drives and haven't had a problem since. I still don't know what happened to all of the other drives. I have them sitting here on my desk being nothing more than paperweights now. Oh, well. Coulda been a power surge or something but I'll never know.