So I got a call from a customer on the way home Thursday night. They were doing some server maintenance, updating drivers and firmware for their HP DL380 G5 through HP SIM. Nothing unusual happened during the installs, but after the admin rebooted the server you got this error message, “Boot logical drive is configured but missing or offline.” I told him that I had never scene it before, but walked him through reinstalling the firmware from the HP Maintenance CD. After a reboot we got the same error message. This was the departments File and Print server and had an external shelf with a P800 RAID controller, so we needed to get this up and running. The OS was installed on a mirrored set of drives, so we tried failing one drive and rebooting. Same problem.
Next we called HP and they had us boot off a SmartStart CD and going into maintenance and wipe the RAID configuration and reboot. The tech felt if this didn’t work that we would have to reinstall the OS again. Also since our data was on a different set of disks he felt fine with the recommendation. The issue is that this was a small department with only the one server, which was also their backup server, so reinstalling and reconfiguring this server would take all night as the backup product didn’t have a bare metal restore.
I kept asking him, how does upgrading firmware effect disks, it doesn’t make sense. So I suggested we back rev the firmware on the RAID controller. The tech didn’t think this would do anything but I felt it couldn’t hurt. After booting off the maintenance CD we installed the previous firmware and rebooted. Poof… magically the server booted and our evenings were mostly spared.
One interesting thing is that windows lost one of the data partitions off the external cages and had to be fixed, but in the end everything worked out well. So long story short, if you have a HP RAID controller and are upgrading to their new 6.x firmware version and get the error above, quickly install the older version and cross your fingers. š