How do I use iDRAC to identify a failed drive’s details and have it replaced?
If you do encounter a physical drive with an error and you wish for this drive to be replaced, you will need to provide as much of the following information as possible about the failed drive, to allow our technicians to correctly identify which drive needs replacing:
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The failed drive’s Serial Number
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Type of drive (e.g. SSD, SATA HDD, etc.)
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Capacity
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Product ID
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Physical Drive Bay Number
This information will aid the technician in locating the failed drive and swapping it with the correct replacement drive.
Please note that this section uses iDRAC8 as an example, but the process set out below applies to both iDRAC7 and iDRAC8. Different generations of servers use different version of iDRAC; you can identify the iDRAC version your server is using when you log in to the iDRAC control panel. Older versions of iDRAC will have less functionality, so the below may not apply.
You can use the iDRAC control panel to locate the required information above. To do this, you must first access the iDRAC control panel and log in. Once you have logged in, click on storage in the left hand side panel and then physical disks.
You
will now be presented with a list of physically drives configured
within the server. Once you have found the physical drive with the
error, you will be able to click the
button to find more details about this drive, including the details
required by our technicians to physically locate the drive. See the
image below as an example of how to find the necessary information
from the details of a physical drive:
You can supply the above information in a support ticket, requesting for this faulty drive to be replaced, and the technician should be able to identify the drive which needs to be replaced. You can also supply a screenshot similar to the one above for your failed drive; as the technician can use this information to better locate the failed drive.
In addition to providing the information above, the iDRAC control panel on most servers will also allow you to set the drive to ‘blink’, which can be used to help the technician locate the appropriate drive. To get the drive to blink, while on the page which lists all the physical disk, click on Identify. Then tick the box for the drive you wish to blink, which would be the faulty drive, and then press blink. This will then make the LED light on the drive’s caddy blink.
If you are able to set the drive to blink, please inform the technicians in the support ticket that you have done so. Some chassis may not allow you to perform this action. If you cannot set the drive bay to blink, this is most likely not a non-hot-swappable chassis, meaning this is not required.
When the technicians have completed any drive swap, you can use this same process to set the drive to ‘un-blink’, using the ‘un-blink’ button, to stop the drive bay from blinking. It is important to do this, to make sure this drive bay isn’t still blinking during any further drive changes at a later date, as this may lead to some confusion.
Once you provide all this information in a support ticket and set the drive bay to blink (if possible), the local technicians will be able to look into swapping the failed drive.
If the drive is missing from the iDRAC control panel monitoring completely (opposed to having an error), then you will not be able to provide the necessary information listed above to get the drive replaced, nor set the drive bay to blink. Instead, you can provide the information on all the drives still present on the iDRAC portal and their details, so that by process of illumination the technicians can replace the missing drive.
Once you have provided all the information from the drives that are still present, the technicians should be able to identify the missing drive and replace it.
If you have any further questions about iDRAC or Remote Management, please look through our FAQ section. If our FAQ page does not have the answer, please feel free to raise a support ticket, and we will be happy to help.