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Netfinity 5500 M20

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kjstrat

MIS
Aug 27, 1999
3
US
I've inherited one of these old units. Another admin put the boss in it only last year and set it up with W2K3 server. The 5500 server unit has 6 drive bays, and an add'l Type 3520 storage expansion unit that holds 10 drives. I'm not sure of the RAID setup at this point w/o having booted into it yet.

And, of course, the problem now is it's not booting up to the OS. It appears to go thru the ServeRAID bios OK (at least it comes up) and initializes ServeRAID Controller 1 on the system board. The "power-on self-test" and "drive configuration" both give me "test Passed" but then I get a "No logical drives found: none are installed" message. And finally, "BIOS not loaded no devices found".

I went thru the mini-config (onboard) to check any logs and found this: "Self test failed for adapter 0 channel 0 drive 0" from October (this things been down for awhile). These Netfinity's have a series of bootable diskettes and CD's used for admin'ing which I'm downloading now. The previous admin left me no media (nothing!) nor any documentation.

I'm just not familiar with these old units. From the looks of it, it's got a bad drive. My advice to the boss is to simply dump the unit given its age (IBM's putting it to pasture come 7/1/2008, it was mfg'ed in '98 or '99)) and get another server or NAS to take its place.

It gets even better: the admin told the boss the server didn't need a backup system because of the redundant RAID drives (doh!). Am I going to be able to rebuild drive 0? Or will I have to reinstall W2K3 from scratch? There's not even any Windows media. I'm even wondering at this point how the previous admin handled the licensing.

My last question is if there's a bootable livecd with ServeRAID drivers anyone knows about with which I could effect a data recovery without rebuilding everything? The boss really wants to keep this thing, but I'm hellbent on replacing it with a NAS, which would work fine on their small network, and getting his data out of the Netfinity.

Any help appreciated. Thanks.
 
I'd say the RAID adapter could be bad...which are the drives running off of?

Burt
 
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