ML370 G4 Backplane Fails Good Drives

[Adam Caine]

I have an early ML370 G4 machine which fails drives on startup. I have changed 2 of the drives and the drives I removed were tested in other arrays and found not to be faulty.

If the array comes up O.K which has happened, the drives function perfectly until a cold boot / restart. Also, if you fail a drive by removing it, there is a 60 second delay in which the server hangs and it sounds like the drives are recalibrating before a rebuild happens.

I have done all the tests requested by HP and no faults have shown up. I have since installed many G4 370's and this has not happened. Is it a backpland BIOS issue and has anyone else experienced this? The server is functioning fine at the moment as all the drives are fine. The customer isn't keen on rebooting the machine however!!

The controller is a Smart Array 642 and the drives are configured in a 3 drive raid 5 with hot spare.

Any help / advice would be appreciated.

Cheers.

Adam.

[John Marinov]

Hi Adam,

Do you have the Insight Agents running? And System Management Homepage? If you do, look at the drive statistics. In particular the failure indicators have counters like "not ready errors". The statistics also have problem indicators like "SCSI bus faults". So if a drive is slow to spin up in this server, but not elsewhere (or the timeout is too short) -or there's a contact problem with the drive cage.

The next thing to do is to make sure that the firmware versions are up to scratch. Both the drives and the array controller.

Cheers,

[Adam Caine]

I have the insight agents running and I will check that there are no errors, I'm 99% sure that nothing gets thrown up in the error logs.

However, I forgot to mention that it can also be very slow on startup. If you listen when it is starting slowly, it appears that one of the drives is continually re-calibrating until eventually it settles down. This delays the loading of Windows 2003 Server, and I have know it take over 30 minutes to start.

The drives in the array are not HP, but are Hitatchi drives which I have used with no problem in the past. Also, I have TRIED HP drives in there (one by one) and this has had no effect.

I'll look at the logs and report back.

Thanks

Adam.