Doc's Bizzarre Adventures

Rage-inducing tech and other stories

The PowerEdge Crusade Part 2: SCSI Madness

If you haven't read the first PowerEdge Crusade, go read that.

A story of convenience and moronity: Ma boi kelvinpw was decomissioning his PowerEdge 2850 that he was using as his pfsense router (the guy had like three 2850s: one went to me, one to a guy named Kevin, and one to a guy named Grant). His drive setup was two disks in RAID 1. So when he decomissioned the server, he asked if I wanted a disk, and of course, I agreed.

Fast forward a few days and I get the disk. It's a 36 gig Seagate disk. Not huge, but whatever. Got it home and I proceeded to--

Wait how do you SCSI disk? I went to put it in but nothing happened. The disk wasn't detected. Huh. Maybe it was the connection; it wasn't in all the way? So I tried to push it in further. And further; and as hard as I could. I probably was breaking something but I just wanted the disk to get into the bay.

Nothing. Now I was really desperate, so I popped open the case and removed the backplane outright to try and diagnose it. Didn't see anything wrong, so I put it back in. Well shit, now it's sideways and the LCD is screwed. I liked the LCD too; it was the best part.

Then I had a sudden massive facepalm realization:

There's a lever on the drive enclosure to secure the drive to the backplane. I totally forgot about that. Woops.

So I got that installed. Now the matter of de-sideways-ing the backplane. Well I kinda sorta got it back to not-sideways. It's still a bit sideways, and after diagnosing the cabling and replugging in the server the LCD worked as expected again.

Moral of the story: Don't sideways your backplane.