I’ve been having hardware problems with one of my Dell Poweredge 4600 servers.
First, two power supplies were dying, so they sent me replacements, plus a Power Distribution Board. I replaced those, and then other things started going wrong. Dell technician came out with another PDB, another power supply, and a system board. And replaced all of those. Then the system wouldn’t detect half of my SCSI array. So they sent out a daughterboard which controlled the secondary backplane, and all of my drives started to appear again.
Unfortunately, that RAID5 array disappeared. And I lost about 400 GIGS of data. Luckily, that’s all existing somewhere on the ethernet on a network tape backup.
So I just recreated this 450GB RAID, scrubbed it, and now I’m reinstalling the operating system. Then I’ll install the Veritas Netbackup software, restore all of my data and then attach my external storage array so I can access the other 500GB RAID array.
Sounds like fun, no ?
Dell support was great, as always. And I have a 4 hour support policy on that system, so I was getting parts within hours of ordering them. The technician (Robert) was very helpful.
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