why won't my SCSI drives come out of stanby ?!?!?

[biffy76]

Hi All,
ok so i ordered two new big drives (146 GB) for my IBM netfinity server, (its old, a 5100), it had the IBM Serveraid 3l , and i tried a 4H card. both updated with latest firmware, etc. and the card sees the drives, but when i go to look at them they are in Standby state. i cant do anything with them, they will not allow me to put them defunct, online, offline, nothing, no matter what i do they sit in standby mode. im thinking the controller cards im using are too old for the large capacity drives?? i dont know, any info you can offer would be helpful!
im using the serverguide 6.x disk to setup the system. i have also gone right into the scsi bios and looked at the card and drives, reset to factory defaults, and it still will not work. the card worked fine with the old drives (18GB mirrored) and i know the drives are fine, i have ran a windows server install disk, just to make sure it recognizes the drives, of course it does, i can create and delete partitions, format them, which i did a low level format via the raid bios, they spin up fine, green lites.

i have no idea whata happening here. please help

thanks!

 

[itsp1965]

Did you check to find out if the server actually supports 146GB drives? If I recall the Netfinity only supported up to 36GB drives, so it's quite possible that it's not recognizing them

 

[goombawaho]

I would contact IBM support to confirm, but best guess is this: the drives are too new/large for the controller to handle. You can't just keep the same old hardware and mixing and matching it in with newer hardware.

For example, some serverraid controllers just don't work by plugging them into just any server - there are compatibility matrices on the IBM web site. Not sure about the matrices for controller matching up to hard drives.

 

[biffy76]

well that is what i thought, however the card sees teh drives, and when i boot to a windows cd, i can see both hard drives and work with them, and they are both reporting the correct size ,(146gb) i also just did some research and apparently the drives say they are compatible with the server im using. , any ideas?

 

[goombawaho]

Do you have the most up to date firmware for the controller card??? That's about all I can think of at this point.


If you used the those controllers with the new drives and a new install of Windows could see the drives, then it's just a matter of a bug with the controller being able to control the drives. They have to be working via the controller or else Windows would have said "no storage device found

 

[biffy76]

yes i updated the firmware before i did anything else with the card, and when i booted to the windows cd, i expected to see the error about not seeing any storage devices, but it picked em up. well thanks for the information, im going to try AGAIN to update the firmware and try and controll these disks, ill post my resolution here for those that come after me...

 

[scsiraid]

1) Are they spinning up?

2) Are they formatted 512bytes or something else wierd?