The PowerEdge R415 drives are not rotating.
The PowerEdge R415 drives are not rotating.
I've got a Dell PowerEdge R415 with dual 8 core AMD Opterons. Its got 128GB ECC RAM, etc. It's a fine server, but theres only one problem. The drives just don't spin. I've tried mostly everything, Trying two brand new SAS Hard drives, cleaning connectors, changing PERC/BIOS Settings, even covering pin 3 on the drive to prevent a spin-down signal. I've used my multimeter on the drive and it looks to be pulling no power (unless it's my multimeter). Whatever I do, even taking out the RAID controller and putting the SAS cable into the PCIe riser does nothing. The drives just won't spin. When the server is powered on, the lights on the front panel that indicate drive activity/presence start flipping out and turning off and on randomly. The PSU seems to be fine. If it matters, the battery started bulging (the one that connects to the PERC card). So I took it out. Don't think that's the problem. Anyone ever experienced this??
Do you rely on SAS or SATA hard drives? Are your systems equipped with Dell enclosures?
Sure, you could test a SATA drive to check if the controller sends the signal to start spinning the disks. This helps identify issues like incorrect signals or power delivery problems.
Euhhhh yeah thatcan break the sas connectors and controller boards. That was a known issue a decade ago when these junkboxes reached near free status on the used market. Very high chance your sas backend or cables are just fried. Other dells with the battery pack perc cards had this happrn too and this server is over 15 years old already so most likely its just dead. You can just connect a sata cable + power connector from the system to a sata drive and see if anything happens. If nothing happens the board is actually hardware defective especiallt if you cmos reset and cleared the raid arrays. If you wanna expiriment with servers good news is that these are worthless and free to pick up at lots of places. If this is to make a usable system I recommend going a decade newer its quite inneficient and slow.