DF 440 NVRAM Card 1 Status = Corrupt Error

[Brielle1]

Hello all,

I've got a LeftHand Dataframe 440 that is showing "NVRAM Card 1 Status = Corrupt" and won't let me bring up the storage server.  Its the only one in this management group.

Ironic thing is, we moved this SAN to a temp location specifically to finish getting the data off of it to begin decomissioning and moving to a larger HP storage solution, but get nailed by this error once we get it set up and turned back on.

So, we've got live data on it we need to get off.  Support docs say call your vendor for a workaround...  Soooo, since LH is now part of HP it seems, here I am.

Can anyone help me get this error fixed so I can begin moving data off of it?

Thanks!

Brielle

[Brielle1 · Accepted solution]

I've apparently still got it in me - fixed the problem, and here's the solution.

Reboot the san, hit escape as soon as it shows the intel logo.  You'll be able to watch it as it powers up the RAID controllers.

Hit control-g as soon as it says Initalizing firmware.  Go into the config, select the first adapter.

Tab to the logical drive on the right hand side and press enter.  In the resulting new window, make note of the existing settings for I/O Mode and Cache Type (forget the exact terms since I don't have it open in front of me).

Change the I/O mode from Direct to Cached.

Change the cache type from Write-Through to Write-Back or vice versa (depends on how its been configured, on ours it was Write-Back I think?).

Apply changes, back out, select the second controller in the system and do the same thing over again.

Reboot, let the SAN come up, it should stop complaining about corrupt nvram.

These changes technically improve the system's RAID performance, at the cost of potential corruption should the power drop out or similar.  If you want to make sure that its back on saftey over performance, reboot again, go back into the RAID bios and change the settings back in the logical drives to the way they were.

This should work with the smaller and larger LeftHand arrays as well, and would probably work fine with the Intel SSR212MA unit too.