Dell PV 705N / 4100 Won't Boot All Drives after upgrade

[djg123]

My Dell 705N had one of the 30GB HDD fail two weeks ago. I opted to upgrade the system to 4x160GB (137GB after LBA issue) instead of hunting down a new 30GB drive as I needed some extra space as well.

When I did the upgrade, I removed all of the 30GB and added the new 160GB (Western Digital WD1600JBRTL) one at a time to do the formatting and I was successfull with this.

Unfortunately now, I cannot seem to more than one of the hard drives to be connected to the power supply and have the unit get to boot. Occassionally, I can get two drives to be powered on and boot. Never three of the drives or all four of them.

Has anybody seen anything like this? Each of the drives can be powered individually and have the system boot and use command line to get status showing formatted drvies.

The Power Draw on the label of the old drives is:

5V -- 600mA
12V -- 700mA

On the new drives, the stated power draw is:

5V -- 650mA
12V -- 410mA


So, it doesn't seem like I am overloading the power as I can rarely get one drive on each of the two power feed lines to get started.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

[rpmurray]

Check the jumpers on the new WD drives. If the drives are set to master or slave then remove the jumpers so it's in the single drive setting. This is assuming that they are all getting power, just not letting you access them.

[djg123]

I have had the drives in both single drive and cable/select mode.

I can regularly boot the system with one drive running. Once it is up, and I can log in, applying power to the second drive is where it gets tricky.

I was successful in applying power to the second drive (bay2) and the system stayed up with Single Drive setting. Once I applied power to the third drive (bay3), the system shutdown immediately.

Last night, I could not get a second drive powered on without the shutdown happening.

I did not that the motherboard is the -001 motherboard, but I don't know what other issues I may have from that as I am not close to getting a RAID configured.

David

[blue68f100]

Connet all drives and monitor the 12V. What you need to look at is the startup surge power requirements. If this drops below 11.75 volts, the PS is not strong enough to handle the surge. This can be in the neighbor hood of 1+ amp / drive for several seconds before it drops down. If it drops below the 11.75vdc you have a bad PS.

Can you boot with the 30gig drive in place?

The 4100 require all drives to be set to Master or Single drive. Some drives will work with CS, but the manual specs MASTER.

These units do support hot swaping.

[djg123]

I connected three of the original 30GB drives to the power supply and the unit powered up OK.. The drives were not connected to the IDE cables however as I don't want to risk the data on them (as a backup).

After the unit turned on, I then connected one of the WD 160GB drives and the PS handled this load fine.

I will go hunt down my Digital KVM to check the 12V load under startup conditions for this 160+3x30GB combination and the 4x160 combination.

I did find a couple of external HD power supplies on eBay and have them on order. Does anybody here have experiences with these external power bricks (+5V/+12V at 2A)?

Would another 4100 power supply make sense to try?

Thanks,

David

[blue68f100]

If you have another 4100 PS to try, do it. It should not have a problem on the 12v rails unless it is weak/bad. But these newer drives with more platter have a higher inrush current.

Phoneix is the only one I know of that have worked on PS.

[Phoenix32]

Not having a 4100 anymore to test with, there is very little I can add, but...


Something is not right here... The 4100 spins the drives up 1 at a time, so power is not normally an issue with them. Plus, most 160 GB drives are single platter, thus they should not be drawing more than about 1.5A on spin up, which with even all 4 spun up at the same time, should not exceed the power supply. And, the power drain shoul dnot be much different than the 30 GB drives were (if they were the 7200 rpm models, it varried). The symptoms do sound like a weak/bad power supply, but there are other indicators here saying something else may be at issue.

Be sure the drives are set to Single/Master.

Use OS 3.4.805 or above (just in case).

Try using a utility and cut a couple of the 160 GB drives down below the 137 GB barrier (it is reversable) and see if that makes a difference.

Try a different power supply.

Check for the factory board mod.


That should get him started...

[djg123]

OK, Here is what I am seeing.

Drive 1 is a WD160GB, on short power cord with two drive connectors, I am measuring voltage on the second drive connector on that lead.

Voltage right after power on peaks at 12.34v and then drops to around 11.74 once the drive starts spinning... Voltage levels off at 11.98V within a few seconds after drive is up to speed. The system will then powerup with only one drive "green"

If I have two of the WD160GB drives attached(second one in drive bay 4 with the second +5/+12V cable lead, the unit will show 12.36V and never start spinning the drives and no power up at all.

If I have a 30GB Quantum plugged in bay 4 plus the WD 160GB in bay 1, the voltage drops to 11.73 and then once again stabilizes around 11.96V. Unit continues to power up properly.

If I start with a WD160GB in Drive 1 and 3x30GB Quantum as the three other drives, voltage starts at the 12.3, drops to 11.56 and then stabilizes at 11.81 after all the drives are spinning.


If I start with one WD 160GB in Drive 1 and then hot add power to a second WD 160GB drive in drive bay 3 or 4, the voltage spikes to 12.3V, I hear a click and then voltage drops off to < 1V and unit will not power on.



I have OS version:
System Initialization : Server v3.4.803
Build Date: Jan 15 2003 18:04:19

I don't have an additional unit at this time, but may have a sourcing option.

All drives are configured for Single/Master.

My Snap 4100 does not have the factory board mod.

We are not even getting the server OS booted before these other problems appear, so I am reluctant to try the Drive carving option. I get the same results even if I don't have the IDE cable plugged in.

david

[blue68f100]

Have you done a factory reset? If not do so if you have assist to locate and do the init setup.

If I have two of the WD160GB drives attached(second one in drive bay 4 with the second +5/+12V cable lead, the unit will show 12.36V and never start spinning the drives and no power up at all.

What happens if you use drive positions 1 & 2?

If I start with a WD160GB in Drive 1 and 3x30GB Quantum as the three other drives, voltage starts at the 12.3, drops to 11.56 and then stabilizes at 11.81 after all the drives are spinning.

I think the dropoff is 11.5 volts, if it drops below that the PS will die and the unit will not boot. You are real close to this value. Just out of curisity have you tried using an external PS (pc) (jumper the start). Then boot with only 1 drive connected to the factory PS. If you try this make sure you ground the 2 PS together, so they will have a common reference.

I suspect the power supply is bad. If you decide to open the PS up, look for bad cap's. These are the most common failure.

Are you connecting all of the cable when you try to boot? It is required for the snap to control the drives properly.

I suspect the power supply is bad. If you decide to open the PS up, look for bad cap's. These are the most common failure.

It is not a good idea tring to power on drives after the unit is up. These are not design for hot swaping.

I have booted 4 250gig WD SE drives in my 4100, so I know their capable of booting 160's.

I never heard of a non mod board not booting, just not stable.

[djg123]

I tried two WD160's hooked to power and IDE cables in drive slots 1 & 2 and could not get the power supply to fire up at all. I removed power from Drive 2 and the unit boots OK.

I found an older PC power supply with the same pinouts and temporaryily replaced the Snap 4100 PS with this PC one, including powering the motherboard and with 2 drives attached it is working just fine.

So it is looking like a Power Supply issue at this time. Now off to search for a PS supply.

How common are the issues with Rev 001 MB? That may be too problematic to find a new MB as well. Might be repurposing the drives for a open source NAS server -- on well !!

Thanks for everybody's help in working thru the issues.

djg123

[blue68f100]

SnapAppliance tried to contact every one that had a 240gig and greater to replace the MB's. Units that were <240gig were not repaired and they made NO attempt to do so. If one was sent in for repair it got the repaired boards. The smaller drives did not present a problem. The 10 ohm resistor dampended a coil and made the drives settle down, (seek). Without it every time you rebooted it ran fsck, and would report error while in use.

http://www.northwesttechnical.com/ has parts for snaps, the 4100mb is $225. I would buy another one on ebay for parts or build your own.

If you want a NAS that has some ump, look at the 4500. The will handle 50+ users has a band width of 3000+MB/sec, 2 gigE lan ports.

[Phoenix32]

Originally Posted by blue68f100

If you want a NAS that has some ump, look at the 4500. The will handle 50+ users has a band width of 3000+MB/sec, 2 gigE lan ports.

Yup yup...