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I have a Dell PowerEdge 1950 server with a PERC 6 RAID Controller that needed some attention yesterday due to vmware ESXi first telling me it lost connection to one disk, then logging it lost connection to all four disks finally gaining connectivity back to 2-3 (can't remember exactly) of the disks. I tried to remount the old disks, but it didn't work so I restarted the machine. Of course it got stuck with BIOS error prompt on boot until I could physically check the server.

Debugging this it turns out that the BIOS RAID discovers all four disks (they are all listen in PERC). However, when I try to create a Disk Group I can't select the disk in Slot 1. I know this is independent of which disk I put in slot 1.

Have anyone experienced anything similar before? What could it be?

Additional information:

  • No errors are presented whatsoever.
  • All four disks are not reporting any errors.
  • No Foreign Configuration is present.
  • I have tried resetting the Controller Configuration. Still disk in Slot 1 is not selectable.
  • Every disk group I am trying to create is RAID 0. I don't expect disks to be filtered out because of that.
  • I have not set up OMSA yet. These servers are fairly new (to us) and I was hoping to not have to do it for a while...
Ztyx
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  • `I have a Dell PowerEdge 1950 server with a PERC 6 RAID Controller that needed some attention yesterday due to disks acting strange` - Disks acting strange? That's a pretty vague statement. Your course of action for this `strange` behavior is to recreate your virtual disks? That seems even stranger. – joeqwerty Mar 18 '15 at 15:07
  • Okay, sorry. I added a more explicit description of what I mean by "strange". – Ztyx Mar 18 '15 at 21:48

2 Answers2

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Are you attempting to perform this configuration from the OMSA gui? Behavior like this sounds typical of problems occasionally seen in that software.

Try configuring from the PERC BIOS menu during boot (Ctrl+R) - you'll likely have better success there.

If you want to deal with the config bug itself, try using a different version of OMSA (either latest, or even a slightly older version if you're already up to date), and ensure your PERC firmware and driver are updated to the latest versions.

JimNim
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  • Thanks Jim! No, I haven't configured OMSA yet so everything I've done has been in BIOS. I clarified my question. Will have a look at the firmware version and see if that helps. – Ztyx Mar 18 '15 at 21:50
  • Well, OpenManage won't be as simple to use if it's an ESXi host. I would still get the firmware updated if it's not already on the most recent version, I've no experience with driver updates in ESXi though. If updates don't resolve, you may be dealing with a bad hard drive backplane slot. – JimNim Mar 19 '15 at 01:01
  • "you may be dealing with a bad hard drive backplane slot". Yeah, that's a good theory. Do you have any experience if the backplane slots are easily swappable? – Ztyx Mar 19 '15 at 13:01
  • No experience with that particular model & component, but the hardware maintenance guide doesn't make it look too tough. – JimNim Mar 19 '15 at 19:17
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If I were you, I would update the firmware from CD. You can download it from the Dell website, then CTRL + R and setup from there. After disks have been configured, I would install Windows Server and download latest firmware and driver for Windows and install the latest ones. I know sometimes CD package doesn't come with newest drivers or firmwares.

Ztyx
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Computerpathways
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