For Mike Quinn Jr.

	For Mike Quinn Jr. by Lance Gropper on Aug 31, 2009 at 9:37:34 pm Hello Mike: Responding to your email (Mike sent me an email regarding reconstructing on a 4210, and not being able to see the array on a Mac Pro). Here's my response: I don't know what firmware releases do which were put out after I left the company, but I can speak to the firmware up to when I left (which was 2.7 if I recall): For starters, the manual wasn't very clear about the reconstruction: 1) You have to have a Fibre link (i.e. the array won't reconstruct with nothing connected to it); 2) You have to power up the array and it has to finish it's boot process; 3) Press and hold the mode set switch on the side which needs the reconstruct, until you hear two beeps. You might have to wait a second or two then try a second time. Now at this point, several things might happen - if that side reconstructs, all LEDs will come on for that side. If the reconstruct won't start, it's because the controller thinks there is something wrong - it might not be a drive - it could be a jumper on the drive, the type of drive, the drive itself (i.e. replacement drive is also bad - but this is rare), the interposer board, the power supply connection to the interposer board, IDE cable, or bad port on the controller. Depending on the vintage of the array, the power supply connection to the interposer board would be the first thing to check. If you have access to a terminal/serial connection, you can watch what it is doing - it might be failing initialization, showing an error, or failing to reconstruct. On your mounting problem, could be several things: On some releases of the firmware, if a drive won't initialize, it might hang the controller. If two drives won't initialize, that would be bad. So, for example, if drives 4 and 5 were bad, drive 4 would blink, but drive 5 might not. In Apple disk utility, chances are the side with the drive down is the one that's not showing up. If this controller required two-sets of press/holds, and was only pressed once, it could have left the controller in an indeterminant state. Final important note: You mention the array is in Raid 3 - make sure the Raid 3 light is on. If the controller is in mode 3, it's actually in Raid 0 Turbo. Also obvious note: Although each side of the array may be in RAID 3, when you stripe it on the Mac (in RAID 0), you almost negate the capability of the array to have drives fail on either side - for example, if the two sides were separate, you could have one drive fail on each channel, and be up and running. If two drives failed on one channel, you are still up and running on the other. But striped together RAID 0, if two drives go down on one side or one channel dies (for whatever reason), the other channel/data is useless. There is a RAID 6 4210, but it's a single channel of 10 drives, so it still won't survive more than 2 drives failing, is slower, but doesn't require striping from the Mac. Lance Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index