System Administration Solution Vault

Question: On my DELL PowerEdge server, the front LCD displays “ E1810 HDD 1 fault ” error message. How do I fix this issue? Answer: The message itself is self explanatory as it says “HDD 1 fault” indicating that the hard drive #1 failed. Following are my recommendations on what you can do to fix this. Verify the Hard Drive Status If the failed hard drive is part of RAID-1, none of the application running on the server would’ve impacted. View the status of that hard drive to make sure it says “disk fault” or something similar from the PERC controller. If you have installed DELL OMSA or Dellmgr , you can verify the status of the hard disk without rebooting the server. If you don’t have OMSA or Dellmgr, you should restart the system to launch the PERC configuration utility . In this case, don’t bother with the reboot, as hard drive replacement is just a plug and play. Remove the faulty Hard Drive If you have support contract with DELL, call them and provide y...

Question: How do I find out the DELL service tag and express code of a PowerEdge server that is running VMWare ESXi (or VMWare Server)? Answer: Depending on what you are running (i.e VMWare ESXi or VMWare Server), use one of the methods shown below to identify the DELL service tag. Method 1: Identify DELL Service TAG on VMWare Server If you’ve installed VMWare server on a base OS, you can login to the base OS, and use dmidecode to get the service tag as shown below. This is just like how you identify service tag for DELL poweredge servers on a normal non-virtual server that is running a Linux OS. # dmidecode | more Handle 0x0100, DMI type 1, 25 bytes. System Information Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation Product Name: PowerEdge 2850 Serial Number: H234567     Refer to View DELL Service Tag and Express Service Code From Linux and Windows for more details. Method 2: Identify DELL Service TAG on VMWare ESXi If you’ve instal...