netserver LH3 netraid failed drives cannot boot

[Micah Anderson]

Server crashed, and now when we boot we get "logical drive failed" and then it tries to DHCP/bootp a boot and finally: "OS not found"
Going into the netraid utility it shows 4 drives failed of the 6 total (ide -0,1,2,3). Version b.02.02 sep 01 1999 of netraid express. firmware version D.03.02 bios ver B.02.01. sep 2 1999. Phoenix bios 4.06.36 PL. The 6 dries were setup in a raid-5 configuration... help!

[Micah Anderson]

Forgot one piece of info:
netserver management controller firmware b.05.08

[Martin Breidenbach]

Multiple drives can fail when a failing drive blocks the SCSI bus. There could also be a problem with drive cage backplane, SCSI cable or NetRAID controller.

You can try to enter the NetRAID BIOS tool (via CTRL-M), select the failed drives and activate them.
BUT: this may result in inconsistent data. If the drives didn't fail at the same time then the data WILL be inconsistent. If activating the drives works then you can run a consistency check but this doesn't guarantee data integrity, it just recalculates the RAID checksums.
So you may have to reinstall+restore backup anyway.

[Micah Anderson]

We managed to get things online by going into NetRaid and onlining all the drives. I suppose we should have done a consistancy check afterwards, didn't realize that. We did check our data on the filesystems, and most everything checked out ok, except for a couple things that we were able to restore from backup.

I would like to know if we should upgrade any of our firmware/bios etc. based on the info above. This problem caused some pretty severe downtime, and I would like to address this by upgrading what needs to be upgraded so that we can avoid data loss and minimilize further problems like this.

[Martin Breidenbach]

I don't know what the current NetRAID firmware version is. But the firmware of integrated NetRAID is a part of the LH3 firmware which you can download here:

http://h20004.www2.hp.com/soar_rnotes/bsdmatrix/matrix50448en_US.html

There's also the possibility that some hard drives may require a firmware update. HP has a drive firmware update tool. First create the update tool disk, put the NetRAID catalog file on it, put 'required' firmware files on it and boot from the disk. It can scan the SCSI busses and display which drives require updates and for which drives optional firmware updates are available. If you try to update a drive and don't have the firmware file then it will display the file name so you what to download and try again.

HDD firware updates are on this page:

http://h20004.www2.hp.com/soar_rnotes/bsdmatrix/matrix65146en_US.html

[Micah Anderson]

I am generally scared of doing firmware upgrades on disks and controllers and software unless there is a really good reason to do so. I believe that there is a newer version out there, but I've upgraded things to newer versions and they didn't work as expected... so, any idea if it would be a good idea to do this, or would I just be "keeping up with the jones'" in keeping things up-to-date?

[Martin Breidenbach · Accepted solution]

Once I've had a drive fail during firmware upgrade... got the message that upgrade was not sucessful. I tried several times but it didn't work. Drive was replaced.

I'd upgrade firmware if
- I'm reinstalling anyway
- I'm trying to solve a serious problem
- I'm told that a update is required to avoid a serious problem
- HP tells me they can't help unless I do update the firmware