LSI Trouble (resend)

Glenn Dawson glenn at antimatter.net
Fri Feb 17 16:09:47 PST 2006


At 02:01 PM 2/17/2006, Anton Nikiforov wrote:
>Dear All,
>sorry for sending my request to so many maillists and looks like it 
>is OFF TOPIC, but i have defenetley big trouble and kindly asking you to help.
>
>I have had server running FreeBSD-5.4p9 and it was samba file server 
>for MS domain (about 600 people).
>
>Today we were changing power supply so we shut all servers down at 17:00.
>
>After changing of UPS we start everything up and my LSI controller 
>starts to claim that disk and NVRAM configuration mismatch.
>
>When i tried to enter configuration console i have found out that 
>all disks in my array are in READY state, that means they are not a 
>part of any drive.
>
>After rebooting (via simple exitting the configuration console 
>withiut changing anything), server stopped to claim that 
>configuration mismutch, but shows 0 Logical drives configured (while 
>before i have had 2 drives):
>Raid1 for the OS (2*140GB drives)
>Raid5 for the data (3*140GB drives)
>And one 140GB drive as a hot spare disk
>LSI FW version is G119 from Aug 27 2004
>
>I'm sure that disks are still containing the information, but i do 
>not know how to restore the LSI data on disks to boot properly or 
>mount this drive somewhere on different system to get the data.
>
>ICP controllers support nondistructive build to build array from 
>disks that already contain ICP information. But i have found nothing 
>about the same function in LSI. And i'm afraid that this will erase 
>(now i do not trust LSI) my info.
>
>I did contact LSI support but 3 people answerred that one is on the 
>vacation, the other on the business trip and the third one is 
>ill..... nice support. THere is nothing to say :)
>
>In case there is no way to restore my configuration and continue to 
>use this server as it was could you please tell me the way to 
>restore data from that drives?

These are some notes I have about the LSI RAID cards.  I don't 
remember where I got them originally, but they might help a little.


Unlike the Adaptec RAID cards, the LSI cards store two copies of the 
configuration meta-data.  Once copy is in NVRAM on the cards itself, 
the other copy is on the disks.  If there is configuration data in 
NVRAM it will be used, even if the data on the disks is different.

  What all this means is that if a card ever needs to be swapped out, 
you have to make sure the NVRAM is cleared before installing the new 
card.  The clear config option in the menus doesn't work.  In order 
to clear the NVRAM choose new config and then don't create any 
arrays.  Then save the new config. Once the config is cleared you can 
install the card in an existing system.  Once installed, you have to 
go to the view/add config menu and make sure the arrays are there, 
then save the config.

  Another thing to be aware of is that once you create an array, 
there's no way to delete it without doing an entirely new 
config.  You can get around this by taking note of the current 
config, then do a new config with only the arrays you want, and save 
the config.  DO NOT initialize the arrays after saving the new config 
or you'll lose all the data on that array.


-Glenn



>Best regards,
>Anton NIkiforov
>
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