Trying to replace failed drive in SNAP 4500

[BMF]

Howdy,

I have a SNAP 4500 that I haven't modified changed or done much to in anyway except for update GuardianOS on it over the last few years. Has been working great. A few days ago I noticed that my IOPS on the box had dropped dramatically so I rebooted it. When it came back up it is telling me that drive 3 has failed.

The drives in this machine are the original: HDS724040KLAT80

I don't have a support contract so I did what any reasonable human being would do, I just went and bought a 400GB IDE drive and plugged it in. The new drive is a WD5000AAKB nothing happened so I rebooted it again and went into the BIOS, the system is not seeing the new drive in the BIOS

I tried pretty much all options for jumpers, master, slave, cable select and no matter what I do I can't get it to see this new drive.

Is there some kind of magic that the HDS724040KLAT80
has that the WD5000AAKB does not have?

I got a quote to replace this drive through proper channels and it is about $1000... that is obviously not a good deal.

Any clue how I can replace this drive?

thanks,
BMF

[Phoenix32]

1. Your original drive is a 400GB and the new drive is a 500GB. This can sometimes cause problems in building/repairing a RAID.

2. Your original drive is a Hitachi and the replacement is a WD. This can sometimes cause problems in building/repairing a RAID.

3. You replacement drive is a WD 500GB which are known not to play nice in RAID arrays in many servers, including the Snap 4500.


There's a good start for you...

[BMF]

Originally Posted by Phoenix32

1. Your original drive is a 400GB and the new drive is a 500GB. This can sometimes cause problems in building/repairing a RAID.

2. Your original drive is a Hitachi and the replacement is a WD. This can sometimes cause problems in building/repairing a RAID.


3. You replacement drive is a WD 500GB which are known not to play nice in RAID arrays in many servers, including the Snap 4500.


There's a good start for you...

Not really.

1. The BIOS doesn't see the drive...
2. The BIOS doesn't see the drive...
3. The BIOS doesn't see the drive...

None of the other things you mentioned make any difference if the BIOS doesn't see the hard drive....

BMF

[Phoenix32]

Originally Posted by BMF

1. The BIOS doesn't see the drive...
2. The BIOS doesn't see the drive...
3. The BIOS doesn't see the drive...

No need to be snarky, that is if you want my help...

Quite often, due to the way 2 different controllers are handled via the backplane, drives do not show up there...

[Phoenix32]

I am going to ASSUME you are right in that the system is not detecting the drive at all. This means;

1. The drive is bad (it does happen with new drives too)
2. The Hard Disk Tray is bad.
3. The Backplane is bad.

-or very unlikely-

4. An Controller is bad.
5. The BIOS is screwed up.

That' about all that can cause it.

1. Check the Drives (both the old and new one).
2. Check the Tray in another slot.

After that, you're screwed most likely without sending it to someone who repairs them.

[blue68f100]

Is the new drive set as MASTER.

Linux will normally detect the drives where the bios does or does not.

When you go into the Storage and looks for the HD it does not show up. You will need to tell it to rebuild the array. It will not do it automatically, it will only copy the OS to a RAID1 partition.

Mixing MFG's and sizes causes problems as Phoenix has already said.

[Phoenix32]

Well David,

I am guessing he figured it out, gave up, or sadly, just went away...

[willPower]

.

[dnsplus]

It has been my experience that most new drives come with a signature already written to them. This way, the operating system (most commonly windows) will show you the new disk in Disk Management as being a nice healthy basic disk. Then, you format with your filesystem, and away you go.

I have recently been playing with a 4200 and various disks, and I came upon an interesting discovery (GOS 5.2.067):

A healthy GOS disk going from position 4 to position 3 showed up as FAILED in the Disk/Unit management screen in the GOS. Moving it back to position 4 did not correct the issue.

I took the drive and mounted it in an external drive box, and ran it through lots of disk diags inside windows. Everything checked out perfectly.

In the end, the only way to get the drive to go back into the Snap as a healthy disk was to 'clean' the disk using Diskpart under windows, which removes the signature that an operating system puts on a disk. This allowed the Snap to say, 'oh, lookie ... a new disk for me to use. I'll put a signature on it, and sync it into the boot raid config ... ' etc, etc.

Also of interest, putting a freshly cleaned disk into a running snap was not enough to get the GOS to recognize that a device replacement had occurred. I was dismayed to discover that I had to reboot the server before the fresh disk would be integrated into the system for use.

That's my story ... YMMV.

[blue68f100]

Any time you break a RAID 4disk array by 2 drives (4 to 3) all is lost. None of the parity data is valid for the drives next to it. The GOS marks them as bad. If only one HD you can have the unit resync the array. Need to read up on how raid arrays behave to fully understand what is going on.