Dell PowerEdge 1950 physical disk has foreign status error

Question

Dell PowerEdge 1950 has an issue with a raid. I have 2 disks on the raid, and it fails. When looking at Dell Open Manage it is because both disks show as state = foreign.

Name                   State    Bus Protocol   Media  Revision  Capacity

Physical Disk 0:0:2    Foreign  Execute SATA    HDD AX001U  931.00GB

Physical Disk 0:0:3    Foreign  Execute SATA    HDD AX001U  931.00GB

Under the "Available tasks" I can only blink and unblink the drives.How can I clear these errors and get the drives back online.

It is a dev machine so I don't mind rebuilding the machine.

Solution

Ctrl-R during bootup brings up the BIOS menu for the controller. Go across to Foreign (Ctrl-n), hit F2 for options and choose Import Foreign Config to load previous config from the disks or choose clear foreign config to wipe it and start from scratch.

Comments

[rezizter]

Thank you. I have installed 2 Toshiba drives (not supported by Dell) Will clearing the foreign config mean that I wont get the error after rebooting?

[JamesRyan]

This status refers to RAID config, not whether the drive is supported. On the perc 5/6, which go with this server, should not be restricted to Dell supported drives (although a standard firmware may be suboptimal), they will just give a warning in the event log.