M4100 and amber disk lights

[gawganch]

Just purchased a 400GB 4100 off ebay. No drives, but the rest of the unit was in tact. When I power up either with HD or not, after the server posts, the 4 disk lights go green and then fast blinking amber one at a time till they are all flashing fast amber. My guess is that the raid controller is bad. Connectivity to the unit is also very flakey. If I use snap assist, sometimes it finds it, sometimes it doesn't. And when it does find it, it comes up unconfigured. I step through the wizard and it always seesm to fail on setting the ip adddress. Any ideas? I am assuming the worst, that I have a bad unit and it's spare parts at best.


Thanks
Steve

[blue68f100]

It may just be complaining about no drives. Do a favtory reset to clear PW and net settings. Install 1 drive in the drive 1 slot, jumper set as MASTER. Max <137gig). Powerup. The 4100 stores OS in Flash ram. So it will format the drive and install the OS. You will need to use the ASSIST program to locate the snap and set it up. If you need Assist or instruction on how to reset let me know.

You should be able to connect with out drives installed.

[gawganch]

Looks like this may do the trick. I did the reset with the one drive before, but I think I used drive last drive in the chain verses the first.

Thanks
Steve

[gawganch]

This is more of an observation, but I have 2-4100 and 1-705 (Pretty much the same thing). I have tried upgrading these boxes to 4-120GB drives. They all give the same result when creating the raid.

1) I format the drives individually to make sure they are all at the same level
2) Create a RAID 5 which takes about 30 minutes
3) after the RAID is built, the unit does a "Rebuilding Backup Disk" This runs at about 1% every 3 hours. I get this on all 3 units. The last unit I am testing with was originally a 400GB unit. Am I doing something wrong, or based on my math of 1% every 3 hours, will it just take like 10 days to complete. If this unit was origially a 400Gb unit, then it originally had 4-100Gb drives in it. Going to 4-120Gb drives hould not be such a stretch. Even if I create a 3 drive RAID 5, I get the same results. A mirror is the only RAID that completes within a few hours.

Model
4000 series

Software
3.4.805 (US)

Hardware
2.2.1

BIOS
2.4.437


Steve

[blue68f100]

Slow responce in building arrays have been traced back to low ram. Turn off JVM, it requires 24 meg free. Mixed drives mfg can contribute to this too. Snap recomends that all drives be the same make, model, size, and firmware if possiable. The max deviation is suppose to be 2-3%. If new drives make sure all jumpers are set to Master.

What is the mfg of the drives. Snaps do not play well with EIDE drives. Compare the original drives specs , heads, sectors, cylinders ... I would like this info. It may be the way the unit calculates positions.

I think another user reported that it took 14 hrs to do a 3 disk array.

use "debug memory" from debug to see how much is available.

Using a 3 disk array with 1 spare, helps too.

Surprisingly the 4100 have the most problems with building arrays. This is due to some of the promise raid controllers are flawed.