Repeated predictive failures on replacement drives

[Kurt_Olsson at Dell.com]

Two things:
1. The "predictive failure" won't go away after the update. You will
have to replace the drive, again....
   1a. In all systems where you have these drives, do the updates now to
avoid this.

2. The OS is immaterial, since you are booting to a DOS disk which then
does the updates (interactive testing, as written in the tool...) Also,
the reason the predictive failure occurs is OS independent. 

With that said, you do run something of a risk if the data is on these
same drives.  A verified backup is a necessity in your case.  

I have had a great deal of success using this tool, but occasionally a
disk will not take the update and you will wind up with a brick.  The
tool is smart enough NOT to continue after a drive fails to take an
update, so if the array is redundant, there should not be an issue.

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com
[mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Nick Jones
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 12:01 PM
To: linux-poweredge-Lists
Subject: Repeated predictive failures on replacement drives

Hi there

I have a PowerEdge 1950 running Centos 4.6 with Perc 5i and two Fujitsu
drives in an array. I have not performed any firmware updates for some
time.
Just before Christmas one drive started showing predictive failure and
was
replaced. Now the replacement is again showing predictive failure. I am
seeing this across a number of machines and I am replacing drives every
month!

Is it possible that a firmware update will fix this?  Dell recommends
updating the Maxtor SAS Hard Drive Firmware to BP05 with: 

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&
rele
aseid=R162703&formatcnt=2&libid=0&fileid=220034

However the guy I spoke with could not guarantee the machine would
reboot
after the upgrade and I have several thousand users on it.

Is it just a case of burning the exe onto CD then booting from CD,
installing the upgrade (hopefully), then removing the CD and rebooting
again? Depending on whom I speak to, some say that I should just give up
as
Centos is simply not supported, others that I persevere.

Sorry about these basic questions. Any help appreciated.

Thanks
Nick

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