Dell RAID Perc 5/i

[vu pham]

Michael Hipp wrote:
> I have a few systems with these. They have a history of *very* bad 
> firmware releases. Very bad. Total array gone bad.  First step: make 
> sure you have the latest firmware.
> 
> Michael
> 
> 
> David A. Bandel wrote:
>> Anyone familiar with this beast?  It's giving me a hard time.
>>
>> We wanted to put in a bigger disk, so shut it down and swapped out an
>> old disk with a new one.
>>
>> Says disk is foreign and array is degraded.  Nothing we did gave us
>> any better, all operations attempted on the disk failed, although the
>> disk is "seen".
>>
>> Put the old disk back in.  Ditto -- disk is foreign, and doing what
>> the manual tells us to do gives us nothing.  Everything fails for both
>> disks.  Can't add the disk back in, can't add the new disk, and
>> believe it or not, although this is part of a RAID 5 array (one of 4
>> disks), we can't even boot.

IIRC, do not upgrade the firmware unless it is the last option. If you 
cannot upgrade the driver, which is the case for David, then even if you 
can restore the RAID5, you may not be able to boot if the current driver 
cannot handle the newer firmware. And if there is no newer driver, then 
it is absolutely stuck :)

I got a very similar problem with "foreign" disk with Perc 5/i last year 
or so and I ended up calling Dell. They did guide me thru step by step 
to get it back. I wrote down those steps somewhere. Just do not know 
where it is :( but I will look for it now and let you know.

Vu