Blade Watch

A friend phoned up with a question last Saturday afternoon:

“I’m in the data center at work…” I could hear it, there was a lot of noise in the background.

“My server’s broken, I’ve taken out the original disks and put a new set in to re-install windows, do I need smartstart to rebuild the array?”

It’s a common practice, let me explain the background. I’ve removed any references to servernames and organizations, we’ll call the server webserver1, which is a DL380G3.

Webserver1 was rebooted under a change by an application team having completed an upgrade of their web application. The following actions were therefore taken:

• Reboot the server.
• Windows starts but displays “Windows NT could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: Winnt_root\System32\Ntoskrnl.exe”
• Application team power down the server using the ILO (integrated lights out card) and reboot.
• Server displays the same error, Windows support are called.
• Engineer arrives on site after a delay and does some basic troubleshooting steps with the operating system which prove unsuccesful
• A discussion with the application team is had and it’s decided it is quicker to rebuild the server and restore the system – Windows suppport can troubleshoot the issue offline whilst service is restored.

So we’re here.  Chris needs to rebuild the server with a new set of disks, his question, does he need smartstart to reconfigure the array controller so that he can build it on a new set of disks?

You don’t have to use the smartstart cd, and Chris doesn’t have one to hand, so we can simply re-configure the array controller using the boot option by press f8 when prompted to by the controller.  Please note at this point, I am not recommending you do this unless you understand the consequences of any data loss/outage caused by doing this.  The process in summary as follows:

Resetting the array controller configuration:

• Switch the server off.
• Remove the disks, keep them in the same order as removed and label which slots the disk came from, DFisk0, OS for example
• Plug in new disks. That way you can plug them back into the same specification/type of server and troubleshoot later.
• Power on server
• Now the array controller will display a series of errors – disks removed, new disks plugged in, your array is broken etc. Press F1 to acknowledge
• Now press F8 as show in the attachment (I’ll add this to the post later).
• You are now in the HP Array configuration utility in the array controller
• Select view logical drive, it will show the current drive layout which is now incorrect – we’ev swapped the disks
• Press escape, now go to delete logical drive, we’re using recycled/new disks so it doesn’t matter about data loss.
• Select a logical drive, now press to delete that drive, press f3 to say you’re sure.
• Now go back to view logical drive and check if there are any remaining drives and delete them, by going delete logical drive.

Creating the new drives:

• Select create logical drive, selecting the RAID type and if you wish to have Enable large boot volumes – this is operating system dependent
• Press F8 to save the details
• Now create any additional logical drives by pressing the same option.
• Now press escape to exit and reboot the server by pressing ctrl alt del keys.
• The server will now boot ready for you to re-install windows.

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