PERC2 Problems

[hrtt]

All

I have recently aquired a PERC2 card which I have put into my Precision 410 workstation , but am having problems with it.
It all worked fine till I turned my workstaion off and now
on bootup the card says my container0 (raid5) has lost memebers and is degraded. and do you want to accept these changes.
Going into the BIOS software it hangs when looking for drives but can see the container which is says is in critical state. All the disks have spun up and look fine though
The data I put on the drives I can live without - I just want to get it working again

Is there any particular procedure to follow when turning the computer and disk pack off ? as I dont want this happening all the time.

Is it worth installing the lastest driver/firmware/FAST software - its currently at 2.1.3 build 2928. The computer is running XP which seems to have a driver on ,but when i installed the 2.1.3 driver/FAST so everything was at the same level the computer wouldnt boot. So i guess the XP driver is higher than 2.1.3.

Sorry for the long rambling post - any help will be greatly appreciated

Cheers

Hugh

 

[johnv20]

Hi,
just a few things

1: You need to upgrade your card firmware - the lateset version of f/w for the perc 2 is 2.6 and can be got from support.euro.dell.com

2: Which drive has degraded in the array - you can check this by pressing cntrl a at post when the card appears and checking the configuration. You may be able to power the system down and just reseat the drive to bring the array back up.

3: Adaptec raid cards really really really need to have the system powered down correctly i.e don't just pull the plug when you're done

4: I'm not 100% sure but I think the perc 2 got superseeded by the perc 3 before the appearance of XP, also the perc 2 is a dell server card ( dell servers don't ship with XP) so you may have a problem there

 

[hrtt]

Cheers for your reply johnv

1) Yeah I have got the new firmware and fast and driver so will give that a go.

2) It doesnt seem to tell me - or at least i cant seem to find that info - under manager drives it sees all the drives

3) Yep I realise that - this happened after i just shutdown my workstation normally - I was wondering whether i need an extra bit of software so when this happens it tells the card the system is going down so it flushes the cache data

4) Ah i dint know that - I may well go back to 2000 in that case - very useful info to know

The card now seems to start ok and show the lun under file explorer but i t hangs whenever i try to access the data - just as well its data I can live without.

It sounds as if I would be well advised to go back to 2000 and upgrade the firmware etc

Cheers

Hugh