R710 - SAS drive rebuild - Bios freezes at 95%

Question

Hello.I have an R710 with a Perc H700 controller. BIOS is 6.6.0, everything else is also up-to-date. Raid firmware is also the latest. Last Sunday one of my SAS hard drives crashed and I replaced it with one of the exact size. It was a hot swap. I saw the status LED (the top one)  starting to blink slowly, what I believe is the signal of a rebuild in progress.The next morning I checked on the server since none of my stuff was working anymore and I had to reboot the server. I am using RAID 5 with 6 drives. The server then stopped going beyond the Raid Controller initialization. Entering the Raid Controller settings was not possible. I finally was able to enter the controller settings page by removing the drive, booting the server and entering the controller settings. Sliding the new drive in, the controller recognizes the drive, starts the rebuild, and then freezes completely at 95% of the rebuild. I tried 3 other SAS drives, but the result 'freezing of the page at 95%' is still the same. Now, what could be the issue? Any ideas?How can I boot into my server with a degraded disk system to at least make some backups? Thanks in advance. I

DELL-Young E · Answer

Hello, thanks for choosing Dell and welcome to our community. Rebuilding stopping at 95%... I suggest that you remove the new drive and trying booting again. Let us know what you see. Respectfully,

JesterCT · Answer

I removed the HDD. The Server starts the BIOS runs until the RAID Controller tests the drives and informs me that 1 degraded was found and then it stops there. No additional messages are shown.
I can only restart the system or press Ctrl-R to enter the Raid Controller UI.

If the new or defective disk is inserted the BIOS freezes as well here and I can only turn the server off.

DELL-Chris H · Answer

JesterCT,

Would you confirm the part number for the drive, that way I can confirm compatibility.

Have you tried running diagnostics on the server, if so was anything found?

Also, are you seeing any amber lights?

Lastly, if you take the server to its minimum to post configuration, which is removing everything internally and externally from the server but the following

System board

Risers

Processor (CPU1) with Heatsink

Power Supply

One stick of memory in DIMM slot A1

Control Panel w/cable

does the server still hang up?

JesterCT · Answer

defective drive: SN WX31C6285969MDL: WD9001BKHG-18D22V1New drive 1 (where it freezes)SN: X410A04ZFRD2Model: AL13SEB900New drive 2 (where it freezes too) SN: X5I0A09SFRD2 Model: AL13SEB900I will run the diagnostics later on and let you know. I tried the minimum config by removing all drives. with no drives it goes through and of course states no boot drive found. when I just add the boot drive it goes through and boots into ESXI. Everything worked fine until Sunday when one drive crashed. LEDs: all LEDs on the remaining drives are green, on the defective drive it was static orange. The new drive shows a very slow green blinking on one LED.

DELL-Chris H · Answer

While I am not showing that specific drive listed, I do see here that there is a firmware update listed for it under the R710. Would confirm the drive size, as it only lists a couple different ones on that page?

Also, if you leave the drives out, then boot to the OS, then insert the drives, are you able to run that firmware update on the drives, if so does that help?

Let me know what you see and also the results of the diags you run later.

JesterCT · Answer

I tried to run the Diagnostics. Everything before the server is able to enter the System Services, directly after the DELL Logo with the caption "Entering System Services... Starting Unified Server Configurator" the server/bios freezes and never enters the Unified Server Configurator.
Could this be a defective hardware?

DELL-Chris H · Answer

Is it doing that regardless of the new drives being installed or removed?

If so then again I would suggest you tr taking the server to its minimum to post configuration, and then try starting the server, if it allows you into the BIOS, then power down and start individually adding the removed devices back until the issue returns, identifying the cause.

If the server still doesn't allow you to access the BIOS under minimum to post then the problem is likely one of the required minimum to post hardware.

JesterCT · Answer

Giving an update here. I stripped it down to bare bone and still face issues. So I am assuming that the board has an issue. At this point I stopped worrying about this and bought a new server.

PowerEdge Hardware General

R710 - SAS drive rebuild - Bios freezes at 95%

Was this post helpful?