mcbeen.com

Speaking of Dell… I had a hard disk crash in one of our 2600’s yesterday. Actually, I just discovered it yesterday. For some reason I was not alerted to the problem so I’ll have to look in to that later. The drive really failed a couple days ago. It was late in the afternoon, but I decided to call it in anyways. The server was critical to operations, and it was better to get things moving on the support end. Leaving a RAID 5 Array in degraded mode is never a good idea. I called up and got a guy named Carlos who spoke good English and was technically knowledgeable. Cool! He asked if I had reseated the drive. I told him that I had not because different vendors have different policies about that. He asked me to try and manually rebuild the drive, which immediately failed. He then had me reseat the drive, which immediately failed. I thought we were in good shape for replacement… but no. “It could be the backplane of something… maybe the controller”, he said.

Now for me, there was a simple solution. Send both. I don’t really care if the problem cannot be pin pointed. They can do that in their labs with test equipment if they really want to know. I just want my drive fixed.

I offered to look into the logs to see if there was an event there, and sure enough, there was. Luckily it turned the call around, and he offered to send me a replacement drive. Considering it was 5 pm, and the weather was hideous, I could not see them making it that evening. He assured me they would, and I went home for dinner.

I was quite shocked to get a call about 7:30 telling me that the courier had arrived. I drove into the office, pulled the failed drive out of the server and opened the box. Uh… what the hell? They sent me a bare drive. Servers use hot swap rails and cages for their drives. This means I have to swap the rails from one drive to the other… except for a small problem… the new drive is BIGGER than the old, and does not fit properly.

After staring at the drive for a few moments… I notice that there is a bright orange sticker on the side of the drive shipping box… “REFERBISHED” You have got to be kidding me. They sent me a USED drive for a server?!?! That has already FAILED for someone!!! Perfect. After applying much more pressure than I was comfortable with, I got the rails to accept the replacement drive. I was afraid it would not fit in the server, but it slid in fine. I then sat and watched with trepidation as the server attempted to rebuild the array with the new drive.
It took about 2 and a half hours, but the rebuild completed, and the array is now back online. I’m not sure what to do at this point. We are virtually guaranteed a double drive failure in this array in the future.