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Isaias PerezFlag for United States of America

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Dell percent 6/I adapter error! Please help (Production Environment)

Guys I have a dell power edge t410 server. It has 6 internal physical drives that are setup as raid 6. Today when I went to reboot the server it will not boot to the OS? I did notice a few days ago in Dells OSMA that it was in degraded state? No I don't have a lot of experience with Raid? The error message saying to check for loose cables and I have double triple check all cable connections and I have reseated the Raid Card itself??!?! Can someone please help me this is a production environment..!?!
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Norm Dickinson

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I've never seen these controllers "automatically initialize RAID arrays" leading to data erasure. A background init happens anytime a drive is rebuilt into the array (or forced, which can can damage if the array was online at the time), which is not data-destructive. The only time a full init would happen that would erase data is if you did a "retag" (deleted and configured the array without initialization) and forgot and checked the Initialize box.

PCS ... Boot to CTRL-R, PD MGMT screen ... what drives are listed and what is the status of each one (a picture would be ideal).
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Norm Dickinson

I have had that happen twice on the same model server and RAID controller, out of approximately 30 encounters I've had with them where I had to replace a drive. I believe it was a RAID 5 configuration each time. It can happen that the array begins a background initialization which erases the data on the entire array without being prompted. I cannot pinpoint the exact settings that were used as it has been months since I last saw it, but it was very real. Luckily in each case I was prepared with a working, recent backup. It has been attributed to multiple bad sectors on the array by some - and perhaps this was the reason. http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/t/19198559