SA-E200 dead after a reboot?

[R. Lichtendahl]

Hi to all,

I've bought a ML110G5 machine and upgraded it with an SA-E200 card wich has an BBWC-128 module installed, also bought 3x 146GB SAS drives for an nice raid-5 array.

Today i installed the W2K3 SBS software for the first time and everything went OK. After installing some Windows updates i had to reboot the machine. That was the point were it went wrong, the machine can't find any os anymore.

So after a look inside the server i noticed some strange things about the E200 card, first of all all 8 led's were off (including hartbeat). the card looks pretty dead to me :(, the second thing that i notice was that there was an ornge led on the BBWC module wich was constantly on (and still is). When i disconnect the powerline from the server the orange led will go off but blinks about evey 15 seconds. Also when i reboot the machine i do _not_ see an E200 controller installed (makes sence with the no os found message).

So does anybody know if this problem is easy to fix? or where i can find more information about it? what to do in case i can't resolve the problem myself?

Thanks in advance,

Richard Lichtendahl - The Netherlands (Europe)

[R. Lichtendahl]

It's getting weirder and weirder...
Yesterday after my problem descibed as here above i disconnected my server from the power cord and

went to bed, this morning i reconnect the power cord and boot'ed up the server and the SmartArray

was back! :) yes, yes :)

I saw during the reboot a short notice in the POST screen with some text like "the SA-E200

firmware was ????updated???????". during the second boot i got two other messages from the SA-E200

in the postscreen (see attached screenshot)

After resetting the disk-controller order in the bios (make the E200 first instead of the sata

250gb, this was reset by something?) i had particially my Windows 2003 install back, although

there were some problems with it, first of all the startup of it was during approx. like a 13

minutes, and secondly after that windows was reporting an error about the matrix (server engines)

displaydriver i've got an w2k3 running on 800x600 and 4bit. :(

In this state the green led of the BBWC module was constantly on (loading up the batteries).

nothing special i would think, the bbwc module has lost much power last night (no power cord to

server)

After that i decided te re-install windows 2003 completely. In ORCA i deleted the raid 5 volume

and after that i recreate it (nice and clean). Then the install process has started, i created one

paration (boot) of 50GB and the other (data) one was approx. 223GB. After a couple of hours and

reboots windows was allready up and running and looked good to me.

In this state the green led of the BBWC module was constantly on (loading up the batteries). mmm i

thought that's strange, the BBWC manual describes that the batteries charging is totally done

within 3 hours. but ok. well'see.

Then the last part of installing of w2k3 was started... the windows updates. After installing all

major updates (with their nessecary reboots between) everything went well. In the next check of

updates i saw there were only a couple of updates left, but two of them poping up in mind. That

was the ".NET Framework 3" and a "Matrox (ServerEngines) display driver". After downloading and

installing these last couple of updates the machine was rebooting and then the terrible thing has

happend again... :(

The E200 was "dead" again!

In this state the only the orange LED was constantly on, and again the machine was telling me that

there was no os found (likes fair to me if the bios cannot detect the E200)

There comes only one thing directly in mind.. this is exactly the same as yesterday, the last

couple of updates causes the reboot (.net 3 and matrox) and during that reboot it went "dead"?

So i'm wondering if it is possible that some "defect/faulty" data was written in bbwc cache during

the last windows updates (.net 3 and matrox) what causes this lockup/behaviour or is this a

scenrio what never can happen?

PS. before i reinstalled Windows i updated the firmware of the SAS drives as described in the post

message of the bios. version was HPD3 and was updated to HPD8

Somebody any idea's or something?

With regards,

Richard Lichtendahl, The Netherlands - Europe (+1 GMT)

[R. Lichtendahl]

Something went wrong with the formatting while post the reply. im sorry.