DL380 G3 Hot Swap Problem

[Bob Gadwood]

We have a DL380 G3 with six 36.4 Gb 15K drives. Dual processor (2.8 GHz), 2 Gb RAM, with Windows 2000 server OS. We find that we cannot replace (hot or cold swap) any of our drives with new 36 Gb drives of the same part number. The new drives work on other servers, but are not accepted by the DL380. They immediately go to fail status after the swap. We recently had a SCSI backplane failure and that board was replaced. The new board is still a Rev E board.

The six drives currently installed all work, but we need to be able to replace these drives in the case of a failure.

Has anyone seen this problem before? Any solutions?

[Chris Rosan]

Bob,

Have you run the latest firmware CD on this server? You can download the ISO image and boot from it. This will ensure that ALL firmwares are up to date on the server.

I'd try that first before anything else. The bois may need updating to operate together.

[Bob Gadwood]

Thanks for the suggestion. We'll give that a try and post the results.

[Bob Gadwood]

All firmware and BIOS updates have been done. No change in status. We still cannot hot swap. The Array Diagnostic Utility report states that the last failure was due to "hot swap drive too small". Our array config utility is reporting the drives as 36.7 Gb even though they are 36.4 Gb. Is that normal? Is it possible that the drive size is being read incorrectly? And that the replacement drives are being read as 36.4 Gb and are therefore "too small"?

[Chris Rosan]

Did you run the firmware CD with the new drives as well as the old drives?

[Bob Gadwood]

Yes, we did. (Using a different server.)

[Chris Rosan]

Have you looked for firmware for the drive on HP site? Also, in SMHP you can see the firmware of the different drives.

Is this machine still under warranty? I'd just ring HP and see what they say.

[Bob Gadwood]

Actually, we just checked and found that the server is still under warranty, so we will contact HP to see if we can get service. I will post the results here.

[Bob Gadwood]

The HP tech replaced the server motherboard (with the integrated array controller). No change.
The HP tech replaced the SCSI backplane board with the newest version (Rev F). No change.
HP sent me a new 36.4 Gb drive. This was also failed immediately by the server.
I noticed that the drives were being reported as 36.7 Gb by the Array Diagnostic Utility and that the ADU reported the hot swap failure was due to "drive too small". So I asked HP to send a 72.8 Gb drive. This was accepted by the server and was reported correctly as 72.8 Gb by the ADU. HP has sent 5 more 72.8 Gb drives and so far these have all been accepted.
We put one of the "36.7 Gb" drives into another server and it also reported this drive to be 36.7 Gb. We can only conclude that the drives were at some point formatted incorrectly as 36.7 instead of 36.4 Gb. Weird problem. Also strange that no one else has reported this.
But the problem is fixed in that we can now hot swap drives and will use the 72.8 Gb drives to hot swap.