Spinrite and SAS

[dustintennilleku]

Hello - I'm very new to this forum - I've been a spinrite customer for many years. I'm posting because I've arrived at the need to run Spinrite against a 6T SAS disks and am hoping to find recommendations for how that might happen.

Has anyone successfully used Spinrite with SAS disks? If so, what hardware were you using?

Googling suggests booting into Windows, installing virtualbox, and it might be able to scan the SAS disk through the virtualbox layer.
Another path is installing the SAS disk in a USB enclosure and trying to scan that way.

Any other paths I'm missing?

Dustin

 

[ColbyBouma]

Sometimes SAS drives show up as BIOS drives in SpinRite. This depends on your HBA and BIOS. You'll want your HBA to be in IT mode, not IR (RAID). If this drive is from a RAID array, then I recommend scanning it in a separate system so you don't risk breaking the array.

 

[dustintennilleku]

Sometimes SAS drives show up as BIOS drives in SpinRite. This depends on your HBA and BIOS. You'll want your HBA to be in IT mode, not IR (RAID). If this drive is from a RAID array, then I recommend scanning it in a separate system so you don't risk breaking the array.

You reply is a good sign - we've gone down this path and just haven't hit the right combination of hardware yet. Our SAS HBA is in IR mode, so we can see the disk.

 

[peterblaise]

I pulled the other drives, turned off RAID, and ran
SpinRite 6.1 on the one red-light drive, which showed up
as a BIOS drive, ( though @Paul F had a utility to run
before SpinRite make a drive show up as full-size SCSI in
cases where it was 'seen' as 137GB or smaller ), SpinRite
'saw' a good drive, no errors, but it stayed red-light, so I
ended up swapping the red-light drive for a replacement
drive anyway.

 

[dustintennilleku]

I've gone done several paths - I believe the disks are "healthy" but haven't found a great way for spinrite to actually scan them. I read somewhere that I could install VirtualBox, connect the disk through the OS, then run SpinRite inside the VM to scan the disk.

One combination of SAS card and older hardware resulted in this error:

 

[ColbyBouma]

resulted in this error:

The file size limit on this forum is 500 kB. You'll have to resize your image before uploading it.

 

[peterblaise]

If the drives are hot swapable, just:

power off​

pull the drives you don't want to test​

turn off RAID​

boot to SpinRite thumb drive​

let SpinRite find and test the one remaining SAS​

drive as a default BIOS drive​

exit and power down​

plug in all drives again​

power up​

reset RAID​

let it boot and watch and wait​

​

Do you have any red light on any drive?