HDS is chrashing LSI 3ware 9750-16i4e SAS Controller

[yesoos]

HI, I have LSI 3ware 9750-16i4e SAS Controller on Windows 10 and problem is that HDS completely crashing this card driver and it needs needs PC reset. Controller firmware and drivers are latest: FH9X 5.12.00.016 / driver 5.01.00.048. In win events log we have controller error entry. What logs I need to provide to toubleshoot if possible? HDS is latest version 5.5, also tested beta.

[hdsentinel]

Hi,

Thanks for your message and sorry for the troubles. Sounds so weird, the LSI 3ware 9750 controller already supported since 2011 and never encountered any troubles, no other user reported issues with it in the past 8 years....


To investigate please do the following:

1) completely close Hard Disk Sentinel first by File -> Exit (if running)

2) Please open an elevated command prompt: click on the Windows search field, type CMD.EXE and on the result, right click and select "Run as administrator".

3) Then navigate to the folder of the software by entering

CD "C:\Program Files (x86)\Hard Disk Sentinel"

and then enter

HDSentinel.exe /ENABLETEST /RAID /REPORT

This should create a testmode.txt, a RAID.TXT and a HDSentinel_5.50_pro_report.txt files into the folder of Hard Disk Sentinel.

Please send these files together to info (at) hdsentinel (dot) com as then it is possible to inspect the actual response the software got from the controller when the detection started.

I can confirm that the above is 100% safe, just logs/saves the response of the disk controllers to files during detection.

Hopefully from them, it is possible to check what could be wrong - and what to do to avoid such weirdness.

Thanks for increasing attention, hopefully from the details, things can be improved.

Also if you can e-mail any details (image/screenshot) about the event log, that may also give some thoughts.

[yesoos]

Thanks, I forgot to add that unresponsivness came after some time after OS is running , so when HDS is started at the beginning of OS boot, issue apears after some time and unexpectedly RAID drives stop responding. Second situation is when I want to start HDS after some time when system was booted , I can't simlply run it and It needs to be killed from task manager plus RAID is gone. What else I noticed is after this issue happend all disk performance monitoring modules from task manager are gone , even those not connected to SAS controller. I will provide some logs from different scenarios. Regards.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for the file you sent. I examined, looks quite interesting.
It seems it is possible to get the list of the disk drives on the controller and the communication with the first drive started - but then the controller issued numerous errors, so then accessing any further disk is not possible (both for reading or status detection).

I suspect the controller stuck in a bad state as then it is no longer working correctly, no longer provides any access to disks - and this results that it does not work correctly again until a complete restart.

Not 100% sure if the issue is related to the disk model (you mentioned in your email) or the controller itself. Would be nice to investigate further.

If possible, please try (after deleting the created text files every time, just to have fresh clean start) create and send some similar reports in different situations, for example
- once immediately after bootup, when everything seems working
- then later, eg. after 10-15 minutes (when things may be still working too or problems started)
- then when things no longer working

as comparing them may give some additional thoughts, ideas about what happened. From those, I can check the response of the other disks and possible errors generated by the RAID controller and verify if the communication always stop at the very same disk and very same detection step (or different disk / different step).
This may give further ideas to investigate the situation.

> I can't simlply run it and It needs to be killed from task manager

Generally Hard Disk Sentnel (during startup and during periodic detection) waits for the disk controllers and drives to respond. If there is no response from the RAID controller (if it "stuck" somehow) then yes, this can happen: then the software seems "not responding" (or even does not show up when started) because it never receive answer from the hardware. I'm afraid this is "normal" in this situation.

Yes, inspecting some more situations, reports generated in different conditions would help in investigating this really weird situation and hopefully there could be a workaround. Sorry for the troubles and thanks for increasing attention to this case.

[yesoos]

Additionally I could test those disks on other , more decent controller (lsi megaraid 9271-8i).
Troubleshooting will take some time as I need this machine to work. Proboably I will build some test setup.
BR