Rotating bars during bootup - meaning?

[noka]

ML370-G3 with SmartArray-641 RAID controller. During bootup ("DOS" screen) when Win2K is detecting SCSI devices, etc. I see rotating bars. Looks like a pipe or backslash character but it rotates (spins) about its center. I believe there are several, perhaps one for each of the 5 hot-plug drives in the array. What do these mean and are they normal or some indication of a problem?

Note: I might have also noticed these on an older LC2000 with NetRAID-1M controller - not sure now.

[noka]

Sorry, it might have been ML370-G2 with SmartArray 5i+ RAID controller. Or perhaps it happens with all of them.

[Stephen Kebbell · Accepted solution]

Hi,

they are perfectly normal. The smart array controller is spinning up and initialising the invidivual hard disks. After it's ready it will display the number of logical drives and continue with POST. If there are any problems or informational messages it will show up as a 17xx error.

Regards,
Stephen

[noka]

Thanks. I believe you but do you know where this is documented? I checked the server and SmartArray documentation and could not find any reference. Also, the reason I asked is that 'someone' told me that they had two ML370 servers and only one of them showed the rotating bars; the concusion (perhaps erroneous) was that it was indicative of some failure.

[Stephen Kebbell]

Hi,

I cannot find this described in any document, but every Smart Array controller initialises in this way. I've been working with these for over 5 years, and never seen any different. Even if a controller has an error, it still has the rotating bar. Maybe the server that "someone" told you about did not have a Smart Array controller installed, as the ML370 does not come with one as standard.

Regards,
Stephen

[Martin Forster_1]

I thought this "wheels" are senseless, except they are showing you that the machine ist not hung up.

Regards

[Brian_Murdoch]

Hi,

If I remember correctly they were introduced to ensure that older "lazy" drives were spun up before the end of the Smart Array self-tests. It was found that some older drive models would not be "ready" in time with certain firmware so would be reported as failed or missing. This rotating bar introduced a delay which was sufficient to ensure that even the oldest attached drive models would be OK.

It's probably obsolete now with regard to modern drives. A few older firmware versions of the Smart-2P and possibly 2DH, (V2.X to V3.X) would not have this feature so I'm guessing that's why you may still see an older server which doesn't display this rotating bar.

It's perfectly normal however and as explained in other replies, if there is a genuine underlying fault, the array controller will display an error.

I hope this helps.

Brian

[noka]

Thanks to all for the informative replies!