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Tim ShortFlag for South Africa

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HP Proliant DL380 G4 RAID LED explanation

The server had some event, when I got to site 4 of the 6 drives where flashing amber. The monitor just had a flashing "-" at the top left.

I rebooted and it claimed it needed to rebuild one of the drives, so I let it. Now all the drives are green, except 1 or the 3 RAID5 array drives that is flashing green. Monitor is showing the same "-".

While I was composing this, the flashing drive is now normal, but the single driver and the 2 in a RAID1 are now showing solid amber [X].

For clarity:
Drives 0/1/2 are RAID5 (3x146GB SCSI 15k).
Drive 3 is standalone (36GB).
Drives 4/5 are RAID1 (2x300GB SCSI 10k)
The RAID5 is the Windows Server booting array.

What can I deduce from the above?
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Member_2_231077

The flashing green sounds like it was rebuilding.

The amber X suggests failed disks but need to know other LED status. http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=397634&ac.admitted=1404344901177.876444892.492883150&docId=emr_na-c00357539-6&lang=en-us&cc=us&docLocale=en_US#N10671 has the disk error LEDs table.

Much easier to look in the ACU and see what that says than to look at the LEDs, also you can use the ADU to generate a report you can upload here as an attachment. Under Windows ACU and ADU are under start->hp system tools.
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ASKER

Thanks for your feedback. Since I posted I tried to boot and the drives looked ok, however the 3rd drive in the RAID5 wanted to rebuild again, so I let it. It finished and I rebooted, but now all drives except the drive 0 of the RAID5, so obviously it doesn't boot because 2 out of 3 of the RAID5 are Amber.

Given the up and down of the different drives, could it be a controller issue rather than a drive issue?
Could be the controller but equally well the drive in the RAID 5 that keeps rebuilding could be causing bus faults so I would remove that and try booting again.
Ok, just been to site and tried removing the  dodgy drive, but it still won't boot. The 3 drives in the RAID5 array only have LED 2 lit each , the 2 in RAID1 have 1 & 2 LEDs lit and the standalone drive is Amber. On that basis I tried removing the Amber drive and it still doesn't boot.
What message is there on the screen when the array controller initializes? It was the drive that kept rebuilding from the RAID 5 group I meant to remove.

It certainly could be a fault with the controller, it's integrated on the mobo but you can use a Smart Array 642 in a PCI slot instead, it will read the metadata.
It's a Smart Array 6i controller. I'm not sure, but think that's a separate card. If it is faulty, is there a way to replace without losing the RAID?
6i is integrated onto the motherboard but you can put a 641 642 or 6402 in a PCI slot if there's one free. The replacement card will read the configuration from the disks so no worries about swapping mobo or replacing it with a Smart Array PCI card. The cache DIMM on the 6i is on the motherboard too, under the PCI riser cage.

Do you have one or two SCSI cables coming from the system board to the disk backplane?
Ok, together with HP Support we managed to get it running again. Simplistically there was an F1 an F2 option. I shied away from the F2 option because it hinted at data loss, but all it did was re-enable the disabled drives. We are back in Windows and breathing a sigh of relief.

Thanks for your contribution!
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Together with HP we created the ADU report which they checked and could find no errors.