PERC H700 - Immediate Physical Disk Failure Upon VD Creation

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routenull0

New Member
Dec 28, 2016
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I'm having a rather odd issue that I cannot seem to find a resolution to.

I have a Dell PERC H700 RAID controller installed on my Intel S2600CP board, connected to the matching Intel 8 bay cage.

The PERC bios sees all 8 physical disks just fine and I've cleared any foreign configurations. The moment I create a VD of any type or combination of drives, right after the warning about initializing, all the disks selected for the VD show up as failed. Reseating them allows them to show back up, but no configuration for the VD remains.

The PERC controller is running the native Dell BIOS
PERC Info:
Package: 12.3.0-0032
FW Version: 2.30.03-0872
BIOS: 3.09.00

Drives:
HGST 600GB
 

routenull0

New Member
Dec 28, 2016
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That is an ancient version. Latest for the H700 is 12.10.7-0001. I'd give you a link, but Dell has broken their download site in new and exciting ways.

Are these OEM pulls? Are you sure they are set for 512 byte-sectors?
I upgraded the firmware no change but I have a feeling your latter statement is the issue. I put them into another machine with a H710 and upon insertion they came up in a "Blocked" state.

I'm trying to find a controller with passthrough so I can perform a low-level format and adjust the sector size to see if that fixes the issue.
 

thenicnet

New Member
Sep 14, 2018
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Hey I know this is kind of a hail mary but did you ever figure this out? I'm running into the exact same scenario and it's driving me nuts!
 

thenicnet

New Member
Sep 14, 2018
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SOLVED: I did in fact have to connect the drives to a controller that could provide a pass through connection for the drives. I then had to perform a low level format to adjust the sector size to 512 byte-sectors. Thankfully I had the hardware available to do this. I used a boot able version of CENTOS and a tool called sg_format. Worked like a charm. I hope this helps someone else!

Below is the reddit thread I also posted attempting to fix this issue.
Help: R710, PERC H700, 10TB Drives, two men and a baby. : homelab