Re: two oddities/issues on dell poweredge 1850

[Mark Davies <mark%ecs.vuw.ac.nz@localhost>]

On Sat, 10 Sep 2011, David Young wrote:
> Are all of the voltages within spec?  I.e., any signs of low
> batteries or power supplies on their last legs?

I can't see any indications of problems.

> Are you using a hardware RAID?  Is it happy?  Has one of your
> drives possibly run out of spare sectors?

Yes I am.  It seems to be happy.

> I ask because recently I resurrected a PowerEdge 1650 (different
> model than yours, I know) that had a dwindling CR2032 on its
> motherboard, a little 5V power supply on a riser card that burnt
> out, and a hardware RAID that mysteriously stopped working until I
> rebuilt it.
> 
> Oh, and it also had a blinking amber LED.  Not sure when that went
> away, after I replaced the mobo or re-initialized the RAID.

I re-initialized the RAID prior to doing the install.

The interesting thing here (I think) is that the status stays blue all 
through the various bios start ups and while the boot loader is 
loading the kernel off the RAID (or CD) but goes amber precisely when 
the amd64 kernel starts running (and before much if any hardware 
probing has happened) and doesn't go amber at all if its an i386 
kernel that boots.

cheers
mark