MSA 2012i HDD Firmware Upgrade Failure

[aabrea2]

I have an MSA 2012i (dual controller) along with another drive enclosure (AJ750A) and many 300GB 15K SAS HDD's. Some of the drives are at firmware Rev 002 and some are at Rev 004. HP documentation recommends all drives be at same firmware level. Rev 007 is available at

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=3687128&prodNameId=3687129&swEnvOID=1005&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-3a0878382b024af28f1346823a

and I have downloaded it. When I attempt to upgrade the drives however, the upgrade fails with the following error logged in the MSA's event log:

Info 2010-08-11 12:35:48 174 A1458 Failure in drive firmware update (WWN: 5000C500137A40AF). This drive is left in an unknown state and may need to be reset.

The upgrade is being attempted through the MSA's web interface. The drive in question appears to be OK after the failed attempt. I am attempting to upgrade just one of the drives (a global spare) before proceeding onto other drives that contain data. There was no disk activity at the time of the upgrade attempt.

I am hesitant to attempt another upgrade of the spare HDD's firmware while in production. It seemed that even though I selected just one drive, other drives in the array displayed a "red" light while upgrade process was active.

And ideas would be helpful. I was thinking that maybe a complete power down before another upgrade attempt might help.

[Ajohansen]

Hi,

Make sure that you do the HDD firmware upgrade offline when there is no Host IO. This is important.
Also many HDD firmware updates needs to be done in steps. So from 02 to 04 then to 06 and so on.

If you look at the release notes for the update here ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib2/software1/pubsw-linux/p2040426092/v62913/579166-004_RN_DriveFW.htm#v9953638

Then you can see that the firmware is different on the 3G and the 6G disks.
Good thing is to check the model number for the drive.

[aabrea2]

Ajohansen:

There were no systems accessing the SAN at the time of the attempted upgrade so disk I/O was zero.

I did think about an incremental upgrade approach but I do not know where to locate older versions of the HDD firmware. If you or anyone else knows where I can get these older firmware revisions, please advise.

My SAN HDD's are as follows:

SEAGATE ST3300655SS Rev. 0002 12 Drives
SEAGATE ST3300656SS Rev. 0004 5 Drives
SEAGATE ST3300657SS Rev. 0006 2 Drives

As a test, I attempted to upgrade one of the drives in the group of (5). This drive was a global spare and not part of any vDisk. I know if the upgrade was successful, it would have left me with (12) drives at Rev. 0002, (4) drives at Rev. 0004, and the upgraded drive at Rev. 0007, but as I said, this was only a test to get one drive to upgrade and then I would return to upgrade the rest of the drives.

I initially attempted to upgrade all (5) of the drives at Rev. 0004 at once, but that process also failed with the same errors shown in my original post. I am not concerned about the (2) drives at Rev. 006 as they are newer drives and cannot be upgraded with software shown by the link in my original post. As far as I know, Rev. 0006 is the latest revision for these drives. The HP recomendation also states that all drives of the same "type" must be the same revision so I have (17) of one type and (2) of another type.

If I can locate intermediate firmware revisions, I will download them and try an incremental upgrade approach. In the next attempt, I am also going to stop all I/O as I did previously, but then also power off/on the SAN to reset everything before proceeding with the upgrade attempt.

[aabrea2]

Also, the controller(s) firmware is as follows:

Current Storage Controller Code Version J210P22
Current Storage Controller Loader Code Version 15.010
Current Memory Controller FPGA Code Version F300R22
Current Management Controller Code Version W421R28
Current Management Controller Loader Code Version 12.013
Current Expander Controller Code Version 3206
Current CPLD Version 27

Enclosures firmware:

HP SPS Chassis Rev. 3202 2 Enclosure Processors


I believe both of these components to be at the latest revisions.

[aabrea2]

In a very strange turn of events, I went back to the link in my original post and the firmware upgrade file has changed. It was

HP_ST3300656SS_0007.fla

and had a date of July 2010. There were actually three files with a "fla" extention depending on drive capacity. I was only interested in the one for the 300GB drive.


The file is now called:

0007-SAS.LOD (970 KB)

and is dated August 11, 2010. No info is given by the HP support site to explain this change. I have downloaded this file and will attempt to use it for my upgrade during my next maintenance window which should be tomorrow.


It also appears that a new revision of the controller firmware has been released since late last week. There is now version J210P23â 02 (7 Aug 2010) available. This update is marked critical.

I think I will be re-starting the process of upgrading my SAN's firmware and the HDD's it contains from square one.

[aabrea2]

First using the software at:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=3687128&prodNameId=3687132&swEnvOID=1005&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-ec2e18d279ae441a852c52d445

to upgrade the MSA 2012i and then using the software at:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=3687128&prodNameId=3687132&swEnvOID=1005&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-f8ec722c901e441d9cd30a2720

to upgrade the the HDD firmware to Rev. 0007 has proven successful with one drive so far. Other drives will be upgraded at next maintenance interval.

[aabrea2]

Solution is contained in the 8/19 post.

[CKlein086]

My MSA also has three different models similar to yours. Were you able to upgrade the SEAGATE ST3300655SS Rev. 0002 to another Rev? I'm unable to find the firmware for that model. I found the firmware for SEAGATE ST3300656SS only.