Question

IBM x345 server - disk controller problem

Asked by: han810p

I have a IBM Series x345 where I am trying to fix a controller board issue. I took over this site, and there is  no documentation. On this server, disk 0 and disk 1 were left empty, reason unknown. I moved the disks from 2 and 3 to the controller position 0 and 1, and the server would not boot at all.
Replaced the controller board, assuming the yellow lights for disk ports 0 and 1 indicated a problem. Installed the replacement board, was able to boot with disks in positions 2 and 3, but when I place them in 0 and 1, the boot halts after looping on DHCP, then displays a large icon of a diskette reader and diskette, with F1 - F9 icons on the bottom pointing to the diskette.
How do I fix this?

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Asked On
2009-10-28 at 14:07:44ID24852755
Tags

Servers

,

IBM

,

controller

Topic

Computer Servers

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
8

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Answers

 

by: hkunnanaPosted on 2009-10-28 at 14:49:53ID: 25688717

The Large Diskette icon most probably means that the computer doesn't detect any Disks, and prompts you to insert a diskette in the diskette drive.

It is obvious that you have a malfunction on ports 0 & 1. The question is if you have a working setup using ports 2 &3, why do you insist on using the bad ports?

 

by: han810pPosted on 2009-10-28 at 15:00:55ID: 25688792

We need to get all the ports working - I need to expand storage.

When it runs through the boot, it does detect the two hard drives - they each light, and the messages indicating that the drives have been found comes up - and right after that, a message comes up showing the mac address and then it displays DHCP with a changing bar and hyphen - like it is looking for the network. That continues for several minutes, and then the diskette icon comes up.

So, I thought it was looking for the network to perform a PXE boot - because it doesn't recognize the OS on the hard drive.

I'll try a rebuild booting into the LSI software first.

 

by: hkunnanaPosted on 2009-10-28 at 15:35:31ID: 25689009

Ok, if the ports and drives are working, what is missing is to have an os installed on them. The boot process misses the operating system and boot partition on these disks. This is why it is trying to boot from network (Network Boot).  You need to install an OS on these disks to have the system boot from them.
Or, if they are on a different contoller other than ports 2 and3, you may need to choose their controller as the boot controller from the BIOS setup.

 

by: ServerManagementTeamPosted on 2009-10-28 at 22:20:37ID: 25690846

Try start the server using IBM ServerGuide and from there you can check the existing RAID configuration on the server. You can't simply moving the disks around to other slots as the RAID configuration is locked by the HDD slot. I presume that slot 2&3 was configured as RAID 1 thus moving the disk to slot 0&1 does not work. You need to rebuild the RAID if you wish to use Slot 0&1 and the process rebuilding RAID will erase the data inside the HDD. Make sure you do a full backup before committing to rebuilding the RAID.  

 

by: han810pPosted on 2009-10-29 at 04:05:29ID: 25692306

No RAID - but I that is a reasonable idea. The server was built straight - no RAID. I will backup, and start over -build RAID 1, then restore and see if it goes. Question: If I create it as RAID 1, with the drives on 0 & 1, then restore, are there other issues I will encounter?

Or should I start from scratch.

 

by: ServerManagementTeamPosted on 2009-11-03 at 19:18:11ID: 25736106

Yes, you can just re-image current system or perform a full backup and proceed with new RAID 1 configuration. Once its done, restore the image into the new created RAID. It should be fine.

 

by: han810pPosted on 2009-11-04 at 05:41:45ID: 25739154

Here's what I did - backed up the disk. Shut the system down. Moved the disks to positions 0 and 1. Booted with the ServRaid disk. Found no RAID (as I suspected). Set up as RAID1. RAID built, and left the OS intact. We are up and running.

 

by: han810pPosted on 2009-11-04 at 05:43:14ID: 31647232

The team had the basics all there - and I was able to put it all together. And that is key. Thanks!

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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