Rebuilding an AX4-5

You cannot reinstall the flare (short of needing to buy new flare drives from EMC or Dell (which I don't think they'll sell anymore).

If you want to wipe your companies data, just destroy the diskgroups and virtual disks (or raid groups and LUNs if you upgraded to Navisphere Manager), then create a new diskgroup (max 16 drives) and a single raid 5 virtual disk and give this to a host. Now have this host do a total wipe on this disk. Then you can destroy the raid 5 again and it should have no trace of your companies data.

If you're super paranoid and want to destroy the flare drives, I'd put them in some kind of shredder and maybe sell off the rest of the chassis for spare parts (as it's no longer usable as a SAN).

Thanks for that (although not the answer I was hoping for)

As regards to paranoid, I notice these machines have XP Embeded on them. Do you know where this is stored? Is it on the disks, or is it on flash memory on the hardware?

It's part of the flare. SPA has a hidden mirror between disk 0 and 2 for the OS, and SPB has a mirror between disk 1 and 3.

One note: other than the IP address, email notification settings, logs and username/password, the flare itself stores no actual data. So you could delete all but 1 useraccount and give that account a very generic password (e.g. password), delete the email notification settings, clear out all diagnostic files (you can delete them from Navisphere), clear the event log and you only have to worry about wiping the virtual disks.

My EMC AX4-5 SPA and SPB always reboot after i'm format all HDD in storage. How can we install the new OS in the FLARE Drive?

If you took the drives out of the AX4 and formatted them in another computer, you won't be able to get the unit up and running anymore. It would take factory loaded drives, but as the AX4 has been discontinued (couple of years ago) it is highly unlikely you can get those.

You mean if we can order 4x Original FLARE HDDs so we can startup EMC right?

They have to have been especially prepared for your unit or to accept any unit. Flare drives from a different unit will most likely not work due to the discrepancy between the WWN in the chassis and the WWN programmed on the flare.

Can you guide me how should I do to make the storage up and running?

That isn't possible via a message board.

If you wiped the drives (outside the AX4-5 chassis), I'd say that there is no way to get the unit back up and running.