Dell R710 Not detecting HDDs

TESmith92

Honorable
Sep 30, 2013
11
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10,510
Yesterday my Dell R710 server froze, causing me to have to manually shut it down. When i tried to boot it back up it was no longer detecting my HDD. It was running a 1TB Seagate Barracuda, i was just getting it setup so it only had OS on it.

It has a PERC 6/i raid controller, when i go into the raid controller boot it says no configuration. I get CMD open and run diskpart and the only drive its showing is the USB i used to to instal my OS and get me the CMD screen.

What i have tried:
I have tried to swap it out with 2 other HDDS i have sitting around (1TB WD Black, 1.5 TB Seagate)
All these HDDs are showing up and working just fine when i put them into a different system.

Edit:
HDD shows up as Virtual drive when i click New Configuration in the raid controller screen. I click initilize and after a long wait it showed as 40% and then it disappeared and showed NO Configuration.
 
Solution
Few things.

With the PERC card you MUST set drives up as a RAID. It does not do HBA or JBOD so even if it is a single drive must be setup as a RAID 0

Are these SATA or SAS Drives? If they are SATA can you plug them into another PC, and install and run Crystal Disk Info and make sure the drive isn't failing

have you tired a different hot swap port? Perferbly one on a different port of the controller (Usually Drives 0-3 are on one port on the RAID controller and 4-7 are on another)

can you toss in one of the other drives, reboot server, press CTRL R or I (it varies sometimes) and then see if you can create a new RAID with one of those?

Also just so you know Initilize will WIPE the entire drive but sounds like you are just now...
Few things.

With the PERC card you MUST set drives up as a RAID. It does not do HBA or JBOD so even if it is a single drive must be setup as a RAID 0

Are these SATA or SAS Drives? If they are SATA can you plug them into another PC, and install and run Crystal Disk Info and make sure the drive isn't failing

have you tired a different hot swap port? Perferbly one on a different port of the controller (Usually Drives 0-3 are on one port on the RAID controller and 4-7 are on another)

can you toss in one of the other drives, reboot server, press CTRL R or I (it varies sometimes) and then see if you can create a new RAID with one of those?

Also just so you know Initilize will WIPE the entire drive but sounds like you are just now setting it up

If you can go back into the PERC BIOS, there should be a page to Wipe all existing configuration (CAUTION! ONLY DO THIS IS YOU ARE OK WITH WIPING EVERYTHING ON THE SERVER) then reboot the server, go back into PERC Bios, and create a new RAID 0 if only one drive and then see if it picks up your drive.

If all this still doesn't pick up the drive, or the drive keeps dropping but it doesn't drop when plugged into a PC then it could be the PERC/Back Plane issue.

You can also try connecting the drive directly to one of the internal SATA's but they usually don't have a sata power connector so you may need to drive it from some kind of external power source from there
 
Solution