Hardware Raid / Troubleshooting

Folks,

I've just recently received my new MacPRO (8core) with HW Raid card.
I ordered it with the smallest disk from Apple because I wanted to add own disks once the box came.

Opened it. Tried to boot it up. Did not work.
Nothing happened... not even the symbol telling "no OS found"

I unplugged the disk trays... removed the disk that came with it (250GB Barracuda) and mounted my four Barracuda 1TB disks. Starting up, booting up from the setup disks, entered RAID manager and saw 4 disks drives as expected.

Configured RAID5 set, created volume. Rebooted.

Box came up with RAID manager warning, saying that RAID 5 is degraded, one volume missing. The disk in bay 1 was not visible. I powered off, tried to unplug and replug the disk. no change.

I switched bay 1 and bay 2. Still bay one not visible, only bay2.

removed all my disks, inserted disk that came from apple into bay1. invisible.

-> bay1 defect.. (not the disk drive, but the slot). I had a search for troubleshooting information, ... no success. I figured out that the HW RAID card is connected to the bays by the iPass-cable. IPass seems to be some sort of standard ... if you checkup molex homepage, you would find some info about that.

My guess:

1. ipass cable defect -> unlikely, I don't think this would be only affecting one bay only.

2. RAID card defect (one logical port/physical port)

3. bay connector on the motherboard defect.

I'll most likely turn it in to Apple for repair.. but I'm pretty much unhappy about a 5k EUR device coming to the customer pracically out of order.

Anybody any other idea on where I could probably help myself? I'd like to have some sort of diagnostics at hand... the Techtool software is not what I expect.. (I'm used to big computing with IBM or HP unix hardware).

Felix

P.S. the box is now running a 3 disk RAID5. Performs very well so far.

 

Yellow,

It's free, but (opposite to my experience when my iMac G5 came three years ago and it had to go to the service too because bluetooth was not working) I would have to give away the box for a whole week !

With my iMac... Apple determined (remotely, via chat - I wonder why this service is no longer available) that the mainboard had to be replaced, I forwarded the incident number to my service center, they ordered the replacement part, gave me a call once it arrived, I turned the iMac in in the morning and in the evening I got it back.

Now it's a week for a box that costs as much like a small car

Thanks for your support

Felix