How to diagnose bad smart array 5i? 1

[johnzbesko]

I recently acquired a surplus Proliant DL380 G2. It has a Lights Out board and six hard drives. I installed Ubuntu. Then, I added a gigabit PCI ethernet card. Upon boot, the smart drive array did not seem to be recognized, ie. the smart drive did not initialize and the system would not boot.

I read manuals, searched online, tried the HP Diagnostic boot CD, etc. and tried different motherboard switch settings. At some point, the smart drive decided to work and I was able to boot. I installed Fedora 6 and the server worked fine.

Then, I tried to change the resolution of xwindows but the screen hung (the server was still working, eg. firewall, file server, web server, etc.) So, I did a cold boot- shut off the server using the power button.

Now the server will not boot again because it doesn't initialize the smart array. What is going on?!

Any suggestions for this frustrating problem are greatly appreciated.

 

[neebski]

I fixed mine some how, quite simply I just moved the card to another port and magically worked! Just something to try. Good luck. As far as Linux and Ubuntu like burtsbees said I don't that it is supported.

 

[johnzbesko]

So, I've been able to get by with two 5i controllers. Whenever the machine was stopped, I swapped in the other controller and the system booted. However, in upgrading from Kubuntu 7.04 to 8.04, I've had to reboot several times and now both 5i controllers are not working. After a few days, I'm sure they will be working again. ;-)

I have installed a 5300 controller in the PCI riser and the system does initialize it, but I don't know how to connect it to the swappable drives. Each bank of drives (3 banks of 2 drives each) has a scsi cable connecting the backplane to the motherboard. The 5300 board has 2 scsi connectors. Do I need some specific sort of cable to daisy-chain the backplane to the 5300 controller?