Troubleshooting Tip: Hardware appliance disk showing as offline and is unable to boot into the system

[tnesh]

Description

This article provides troubleshooting steps when the hardware appliance disk is showing as offline and is unable to boot into the system.

Scope

FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer.

Solution

The error message:

• 'There are offline or missing virtual drives with preserved cache' will be displayed on the hardware appliance console:

• This indicates that either the virtual drives or the hard drive might be in an offline state.
• A possible solution is to 'Clear Virtual Drive configuration' from the console and verify the status again.
• 'Clear Virtual Drive configuration' might lead to data being deleted.

Solution:

1. Reboot the hardware appliance.
2. From the console, press any key to enter the configuration utility page:
                                                                      
                                                                                           

3. On the Configuration utility page -> VD Mgmt -> Select first line 'AVAGO MegaRaid …' -> Press F2 on the keyboard -> Clear Configuration
   Note: It may require connecting the external keyboard to the hardware appliance to parse the F2 key correctly to the appliance.
                                                                                        

   

4. Select Yes to clear the configuration:
                                                                                            

   

5. On the configuration utility page, it will now show all hard drives as 'Unconfigured Drives'.
                                                                                                     

   

6. Press Esc on the keyboard -> Select yes -> Press Control+Alt+Delete to reboot:
   

                                                                                
   

7. During the reboot, it will start booting into the OS/image and start initializing:
                                                                                       

   

8. After booting into the system, proceed to Login from the GUI -> Verify the RAID Management status.
   [FortiAnalyzer]# diagnose system raid status
   
   
9. If the FortiAnalyzer is running in HA mode, back up the HA configuration, change this appliance (in concern) to standalone, and reboot the appliance. Otherwise, the following error will appear in the steps.
                                      
   

10. If Raid level & Status: Unavailable and Disk Status: Unused, proceed to format the disk via CLI:
                                                                           
    

Format disk via CLI; This will reboot the appliance:

[FortiAnalyzer]# execute format <disk | disk-ext3 | disk-ext4> <RAID level> [<group>]

11. During the reboot, verify if the following line is displayed on the console:

'/var' is not mounted

If /var is not mounted, proceed to run the command below to mount the file system correctly:

[FortiAnalyzer]# diagnose system fsck harddisk 

12. Log in to the GUI -> Raid Management and verify if all the statuses are good.

[cmartinez1]

The information was very helpful, thank you.