Despite that fact that I’ve written over 270 posts in the past 5 years on this blog, one of my most popular posts has been my article on CLARiiON CX700 FLARE Recovery. I’ve been assisting someone via e-mail over the past month or so who was having problems getting a CX700 he’d acquired to boot. He’s a smart guy, but hasn’t used a CLARiiON before. And I was working from muscle memory and unable to eyeball the console for myself. So it was an interesting challenge, combined with varying time zones.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to do one or two posts on some basic CX stuff that may or may not assist people who are doing this for the first time. This isn’t going to be a comprehensive series but rather a few notes and examples as I think of them.

In this instance, my correspondent had a terminal connection to the array, and was seeing the following output:

AabcdefgBCDEabFabcdGHabIabcJabcKabcLabcMabcNabOabPabQabRabSabTabUabVabWabXY
EndTime: 07/29/2013 04:11:59
.... Storage System Failure - Contact your Service Representative ...
ErrorCode: 0x00000142
ErrorDesc:
Device: LCC 0 UART
FRU: STORAGE PROCESSOR
Description: LCC slot indicator Error!
Error detected when handling LCC READ command
EndError:
ErrorTime: 07/29/2013 04:11:38

Basically, the key thing was that error code ending in 142. According to this list of CX error codes I dug up, it indicates some sort of problem with the LCC. What wasn’t clear until much later, unfortunately, was which SP my correspondent was connected to. It turned out that SP A was faulty and needed to be replaced. There’s also a LCC 0 UART Sub-Menu available from the Diagnostics section of the Utility Partition. You can perform LCC diagnostics at this point to verify the POST errors you’re seeing. In short, pulling SP A allowed the system to boot, and error codes mean something to someone. Please note that I haven’t verified if these apply to the CX3, CX4 or VNX.