P400i Controller Not Detecting Physical Drives

[Rhonda Dove]

We have a P400i Smart Array, that had two bays 12HDD each, with a total of 18 hard drives installed. We added two new bays and an additional 24 hard drives but the controller does not see them. I've checked the power (all drives have power), I've checked the cabling on the backplane and all is secure, the ACU shows neither creation or expansion options online or offline, and the ACU CLI does not show any unassigned physical drives. I am unable to tell if the SAN switch needs some kind of additional configuration "to see" these bays. All my research says this model is auto-configured for four bays by default. Can someone please point me in the right direction?

[Torsten.]

Can you explain how a P400i is related to a SAN switch?

What hardware do we talk about?

[Rhonda Dove]

This is an HP P400i Smart Array controller whose ACU is mainly accessed via an HP Proliant DL360 G5 server. The bays are HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array 2000 Drive Enclosure I/O Module Storage enclosure - 12-bay. We also run VMWare on two ESX servers that HP Proliant DL380 G5. We do have BBWC.

I wasn't really sure the SAN switch would have any effect unless their were some kind of zoning issue with the ports.

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

A MSA2000 cannot be managed by ACU.

You need to go to the webpage of the MSA.


I assume you have this proliant server, connected via fibre channel and the switches to the MSA2000 - the smartarray P4400i is not invloved here.

[Rhonda Dove]

Perhaps I am a bit confused, but we have added disk space to this server system in the past when we added new hard drives to the second bay using the ACU. We had no trouble during that time. It is only now that we are adding two more bays with drives that it seems unable to see the new bays. All of the instructions I have read on how to add in the additional space seem to take it for granted that the hardware will automatically detect the new bays which is not happening in our case.

Thank you for patience and help.

[Rhonda Dove]

Sorry, I will look at the MSA webpage, thank you.

[Rhonda Dove]

Thank you Torsten for pointing me in the right direction. For any one else who might have a moment like this one. You will need to web remote in to the MSA controller, which means you will need the IP address of the controller. Once there, go into the Manage portion of the menu to see your disks and begin your configurations.

[Rhonda Dove]

See comment by Torsten and myself above.