NetServer LH 3000R Integrated RAID

[CA1351760]

We took a major power hit, and lost drives on a couple of my NetServers. I have one that putting new drives in did not help. Put the original drives back in, and switched to Channel B. All drives spin up, and a logical drive is seen, but 2 are marked failed. M into netraid express, and do not have an option to choose between the configuration in NVRAM, or Disk. How do I get to there?

[Sean T. Craig]

Hi There,

Let me start off by saying, HP still offers free phone support for this model of Netserver and they can walk you through getting everything back, any time of day or night. You can reach them at 1-800-474-6836 and say "Netserver" at the prompt.

Next, we need to figure out what your configuration is. Go into the M utility and choose Objects-->Physical Drive
Your drives will list the SCSI ID, Array Designation and status. Choosing each drive, one after the other, press to bring up the properties. You want to make sure that they are all showing capacity (i.e. 8677MB, 17365MB, 34731MB, 70006MB) and if there are any errors recorded for each drive.

If there are errors on an online drive, replacing a failed one will likely not do you any good. Media errors can be corrected by disabling your embedded NetRAID in the BIOS and accessing the drives through the embedded SCSI BIOS (ctrl+c) and running a media verify on the drive in question.

If all the drives are in the same array, (ie. A0-x) then 2 failed drives cannot be rebuilt from. A RAID-5 can only operate with a maximum of one failed member. You can attempt to force one of the 2 drives online through the Physical Drive Selection Menu (as above), pressing on the drive and choosing "Make Online". If one of the 2 drives looks better than the other (one with errors, one without) then force the better one of the 2 online.

Escape out of the utility and boot to the O/S. If it boots successfully, try to rebuild the remaining failed drive. The easy way is to just pull the drive and reseat it; an auto-rebuild should commence.

Let us know how that goes. If you need any other help, post your configuration here so we know what we're working with.

Good luck,

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

[e4services]

You load the logical drive info from the logical drive menu if I remember right.

[Sean T. Craig]

There is no option to choose between NVRAM and Disk unless they are mismatched. Going into the Logical Drives Menu under Objects will allow you to view the current LD Configuration and it is always a good idea to record that for your records in case your configuration is lost and you need to recreate your arrays; which you can do without losing data provided the values are the same and you don't initialize the array.