How to live with disabled disks
Recently, I was working with a customer’s Sun StorEdgeTek 2540 array which mysteriously had all twelve disks in disabled state.
Details
Name: t85d01
ID: Tray.85.Drive.1
Array:
Array Type: 2540
Tray: 85
Slot Number: 1
Role: Unassigned
Virtual Disk: –
State: Disabled
Status: Optimal
Capacity: 279.396 GB
Type: SAS
Speed (RPM): 15000 RPM
Firmware: SA04
Serial number: 000834C6K8PC JHV6K8PC
Disk World Wide Name: 50:00:CC:A0:0D:0B:EC:60
The funniest thing was that in SupportData the information was opposed. So if you find yourself in the same situation don’t waste your time on googling, resetting controllers and array’s configuration – it won’t help. All you’ll see is the following error:
“The operation cannot be completed because either there is a problem communicating with one or more of the disks in the storage array, or no disks are currently connected. Correct the problem, then retry the operation.”
The only possible salvation from this was opening a support case in Sun. After that, the engineer just wiped out all data by doing sysReset and sysReboot from VxWorks, it’s OS that drives this disk array. To get into it, you will have to know a super-duper password, which Sun keeps in secret.
What was the root cause? My take is that during an initial configuration someone just had done a real bad thing to this array, e.g. abruptly terminated firmware upgrade or tried to downgrade it from CAM, which corrupted drive configuration databases (DACstore). So just be careful and prudent or double check that your backups are up to date.
P.S. This also applies to 6140/6540 arrays.