Powervault 220S Can see in windows! no drive space?

[KLewisBPM]

Hi

I have a Dell Poweredge 2650 with a PERC 3 DC SCSI controller. I have a Powervault 220s plugged into the PERC.

In windows 2000 server when I boot up I get the message

"Found New Hardware" DELL PV22XS SCSI Processor Device

I cannot find a driver for this even when entering the service tag on Dells website.

I can see the Logical disk drive in My Computer but it is 0 in size.



Kind Regards

Kelley Lewis

 

[g8rgrowl]

Hey KLewisBPM - i'm in the same boat - I have a PE2450 with a Perc 3DC and am fighting the same battle - haven't found anything on the Dell Forums yet either.

Did you ever figure out what was going on with yours?

I have Array manager 3.4.0 and am wondering if that needs to be upgraded to get it recognized.

If you've figured out any new gems on this I'd love to hear!

 

[g8rgrowl]

Wanted to let folks know I figured this one out. It took a call to the folks at Dell Enterprise Support but it turns out that the error is a somewhat nuisance one and you can get away with not doing anything about it; however, they did give me the link to download a set of drivers that you can use to make the problem go away. What is happening is that Windows is seeing the SCSI backplane in the 220S and trying to setup a driver for that portion of the 220S.

Best way to get the drivers is to go to

http://support.dell.com

and do a lookup on your system's service tag on the SERVER that you have the 220S connected to. This is KEY -- it's on the SERVER's downloads. In the listing of Server downloads, go into the category "SCSI non-RAID Controllers". I know this is anti-intuitive if you have your 220S setup in RAID mode, but it's because Windows when it throws this complaint is unaware you are using RAID -it's seeing a plain SCSI backplane and wanting a driver.

When you go into "SCSI non-RAID Controllers" you'll see a selection for "Dell Backplane". Go in there and you'll find a nice little 25 kb file you can download, uncompress on your server's HD, and when windows asks for the driver, point it there -- and away you'll go. Here's the text from the Dell posting for the file:

Release Title: SCSI non-RAID: Dell Backplane, Driver, Multi OS, Multi Language, Multi System, A03
Release Date: 08/11/2004
Description: This Backplane.INF file contains support for Dell PowerEdge Servers and PowerVault Storage Enclosures. This INF file will prevent the yellow warning from displaying in the Windows 2000 Device Manager.

Hopefully my posting this will save someone else the tortuous frustration it took for me to find this. I will say though the Dell Enterprise support guys that support businesses using Dell Servers were very helpul and knowledgeable. I've spoken to 3 guys in Austin over the last 4 days working through various setup issues and all were very good. Given the bad experiences we've all had with support from many firms, this was a breath of fresh air - I hope it won't be the only one I ever find from Dell.