One of my clients was a parent company for another organization out of town. That organization had their own I.T. support and the company was shut down. All the equipment was sent back to the parent organization (my client). In this equipment, there are 3 Dell PowerVault MD3000 SAS devices. My client would like to utilize these for their storage needs. They do not need to recover any data from the other organization.
So my problem starts with the fact that they removed all the drives from these 3 different units to ship them back and did not label any of them for which device or slot they belong to. So it's a total crap shoot guessing which drives used to be where.
I have only started with one device, fully populated with drives. My first issue was not knowing the password to manage the device. I was able to solve this with the serial connection and was able to clear the password. No that I have full access to the device (in-band and out-of-band), my problem is that it shows disk groups that are offline and it will not let me delete them. I tried solving this by using the CLI and running the "clear storagearray configuration" command, but when it tries to execute the script, the command fails with "Error 18 - The operation cannot complete because of an internal target error."
I have searched all over and cannot find any answers for this. I checked the warranty status of these devices and unfortunately they are no longer under warranty. Each of these had 15 drives in them, so the possible number of combinations to try and guess which drives belong where is huge and that is not a practical solution.
Am I missing something? Surely there is a way to clear all the configuration off these and utilize them again since I am not trying to recover any data. Can anyone help me? Any assistance would be much appreciated.