HP Netserver LC2000

[Penny Reed]

Hi,

I recently had a hard drive failure in this server. Unfortunately the people who put this server into service failed to document anything about it! The server started beeping and the drive light on the bad drive went red. I put the new drive in, and the drive light is now green, but the server continues to beep.

The unknown here is what kind of raid card it's got in it. I tried to find out by using HP Top tools. It gives me all the information about the server EXCEPT what I really need to know. I'm getting an error while trying to get the report. The error states "The procedure entry point ScsiGetAllDevInfo could not be located in dll HPSCSAPI.dll"

Unfortunately I have to wait until Sunday to even be able to reboot this server, and I want to get my ducks in a row now. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to do something with the raid to get it to rebuild the new drive back into the array. All my other servers seem to do this automatically, so I'm not sure how to go about this. Any ideas on how I can find out what kind of raid card it's got?

[kris rombauts · Accepted solution]

Hi Penny,

the raid card is a Netraid card like 1Si/3Si, 1M or 2M since it has an alarm.

It's best to install a utility and manually start a rebuild, i guess the AUTO REBUILD feature is not enabled on this controller, if it was, it would have rebuild that disk automatically and your RAID array would have been optimal again and the alarm should have stopped.


Download the Netraid Assistant utility from here:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?locale=en_US〈=English&pnameOID=19399&prodSeriesId=50440&prodTypeId=15351&basePartNum=COL3578&locBasepartNum=ns-12645-1&os=Microsoft+Windows+2000+Server&tech=Software++Storage+Controller

It's also a good idea to add the Netraid monitor service :

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?locale=en_US〈=English&pnameOID=19399&prodSeriesId=50440&prodTypeId=15351&basePartNum=COL3577&locBasepartNum=ns-12644-1&os=Microsoft+Windows+2000+Server&tech=Software++Storage+Controller


The disk with status "Ready" is the new one you inserted and that one should be used to rebuild onto.


Normally their is no reason to reboot the server for a failed disk, this is where the raid card is for after all and you don't have to come to the office on your
Sunday :-)


HTH

Kris

[e4services]

To add my 2 cents, The alarm (beep) is from the netRAID card, must have it's alarm "on". You could silence it if you had the NetRAID Assistant software on the server somewhere. What I am not sure is if it does not silence until it is done rebuilding (since it is still 'degraded' until it is finished). It may be that you have done all you can do and Auto-Rebuild is 'On' and the drive is being rebuilt as we speak.
You could install NetRAID Assistant software even now to see.

[Sean T. Craig]

Hi Penny,

What you should do is give HP a call at 1-800-474-6836 and say "Netserver" at the prompt. The friendly support staff will be happy to help you figure out what is going on. Currently, HP does not charge for phone support of this model of Netserver.

Hope this helps,

Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.

[Penny Reed]

I already have a case open on this with HP, and unfortunately installing the Netraid assistant utility requires the reboot. That's where I'm stuck.

There wasn't any documentation with this download, and I'm not familiar with the product, so I wanted to sort of have an idea what all might be involved with this project.

Any ideas on how long this rebuild process is going to take? It's been experience in the past that this can be done ont he fly while the server is available to my users, is this a bad assumption with this particular RAID?

I wish I could get my hands on some documentation, maybe I'm not looking in the right place?

The netraid monitor states that The only Integrated NetRAID controller that this monitor is supported with is the Integrated NetRAID controller on the LH 3000, LH 6000, and LT 6000. So I'm not sure it's going to do me much good.

[kris rombauts]

Hi Penny,

- i am not 100% sure about the reboot in this particular case with a failed disk but in many cases that require no configuration change (i.e. add or delete a logical drive) the Netraid assistant works fine right after installation. Did you tried to start it and did it gave an error like " cannot connect to the controller" i.e. ?


- their is plenty of Netraid documentation on hp.com, check here i.e.:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual&locale=en_US&docIndexId=179111&taskId=101&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=51919

i.e. for 3Si/1Si :

http://h200001.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/lpn11619/lpn11619.pdf



- the time a disk rebuild takes highly depends on the number of disk in the same array and the disk capacity aswell as the servers workload (if done online).
It can be from 45 min up to 2 hours or more in large configurations for a 18 GByte disk i.e.

Under normal circumstances (when the AUTOREBUILD feature is enabled on the Netraid controller) a failed disk can be swapped online and causes no downtime, it just causes a extra I/O load on the disk subsystem which you will notice if the server runs production.


-The monitor version i pointed to can perfectly be used on the 3Si/1Si or 1M/2M and embedded Netraid as the title of the download page indicates (see also release notes details) , not sure where it is written that this one is only for embedded Netraid in the LH/LT servers but that is then incorrect.

HTH

Kris

[Penny Reed]

It didn't even occur to me to try to use the Netraid assistant after I installed it because it said that a reboot is necessary to accept the system changes.

I was successfully able to get into the tool and silence the alarm, so I'm going to go ahead and try to rebuild the failed drive now.

Thanks for all of your help. I've never been able to use something that says it needs a reboot before!

[Penny Reed]

This is confusing, the netraid assistant manual mentions an autorebuild option, but it doesn't appear to be anywhere in the netraid assistant. It keeps mentioning Netraid Express tools.

How many tools do I need to see all this stuff you mentioned earlier?

[Sean T. Craig]

Hi Penny,

You're right, you don't necessarily need to reboot after installing the NetRAID Assistant, only if you're running Windows NT. They use the same download for NT, 2000 & 2003 but the install script says to reboot afterwards because NT requires it.

The autorebuild option is only available through the BIOS level utility call NetRAID Express Tools which is accessible by pressing M at boot-up.

To find out which type of NetRAID Card you have, you can use the NetRAID Assistant and go into the Adapter Menu and choose Properties. The Firmware Version on the left-hand side will give an indication of which card it is. If it starts with an H (H.02.02, H.01.08, etc) then it is an M series controller. The cache size will then tell you which one; 32MB = NetRAID-1M, 64/128MB = NetRAID-2M.
For the other cards, you just need to look at the letter:
F.xx.xx = NetRAID-1si
C.xx.xx = NetRAID-3si
The LC2000 doesn't have an integrated NetRAID.

If the rebuild fails, I recommend you check the properties of the online drives by double-clicking on each one in the Physical Devices section of NetRAID Assistant and make sure there are no errors on any of them. If an online drive has errors, it may cause a rebuild to fail, even if the new drive is good.

Hope this is helpful,

Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.

[Penny Reed]

The rebuild doesn't necessarily fail, it just gives me the message "Proper device not selected" The failed drive was replaced by a new drive, which has a status of "Ready". There are no errors on any of the drives.

The firmware version is F.02.07

I haven't called support back because they told me a reboot is required, and that's just not an option until Sunday (hopefully I can get in touch with someone then if I need too).

At this point I'm not sure what else to try.

[kris rombauts]

Penny,

it would help if you could attach a screenshot of the current situation and configuration from the Netraid Assistant GUI and post it in the forum.

Did you try to configure the new disk (with status Ready) as a Hotspare disk i.e. and then do a manual rescan of the controllers SCSI bus in Netraid Assistant. If a array is in a failed/degraded mode, this should kick off the rebuild process and use the hotspare disk to rebuild onto.


Kris

[Penny Reed]

it's not allowing me to put the screen shots here.

[kris rombauts]

should be no problem, done it before as long as the size is not to big, take .jpg not .bmp screenshots.

Kris

[Penny Reed]

I don't have any screen shot software per say. I took the screen shots by using alt+printscreen. How do I get .jpg screen shots without the software?

[kris rombauts]

Penny,

just paste into Word (office and save as .jpg

Did the hotspare trick worked ?

Kris

[Sean T. Craig]

Hi Penny,

You don't necessarily need to reboot in order to get support from HP. Just tell them that you can't down the server right now but you have NetRAID Assistant installed and you would like to do as much troubleshooting as you can without rebooting. I'm sure they will do everything they can. Enabling Auto-Rebuild will not be an option but at least they can check to see why the drive is not rebuilding.

Good luck,

Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.

[Penny Reed]

I came in yesterday as a planned maintenance window for this server, and I did in fact reboot. This didn't remedy the problem, but I would have had to reboot anyways in order to get into the netraid express tools (ctrl+M).

There were 3 drives in the array instead of 4, so Kris you're right making the new drive a hot spare is what I ended up doing and the issue appears to be resolved.

I wouldn't have had to reboot the server to do that, but until I saw that there were only 3 drives in the array in the different orientation presented by the netraid express tool, I didn't understand. It was still good to reboot because the server had been up 1 1/2 years!!

I hope this helps someone else out there who might some day experience this same problem, this is some good dialog. Thanks all for all your help.