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Yellow light on 3U drive & Missing Discs

thedude

Member
After years of trouble free enjoyment, I've run into my first issue with my Kaleidescape.

My 3U server has a yellow light on the front panel. When I remove the front panel, 1 of my hard drives has a yellow rather than blue light.

I have 2 disc vaults. #1 is working perfectly. #2 was reporting that it no longer had any discs in it (although there were hundreds). The discs were still listed in my library on the app, but wouldn't allow me play them since it thought the discs weren't present.

I'm not sure if these issues are related or arose coincidentally at the same time.

Here are the steps I've taken so far to address everything, but to no avail.

1) Reboot everything
2) Pull out hard drive with yellow light and put back in
3) Eject all discs from disc vault #2 (it told me no discs present)
4) Remove disc vault cover and physically remove all discs

In reading K's instructions for removing the vault cover, it recommends removing it and reinstalling from my system. However, when I go to the Components in the Browser, I don't see anyway to remove the vault from my components.

Not sure what to do next, as I don't want to put in the discs before I put it in the rack and I don't want to put it in the rack again if I need to do something else to the hardware first.

Thoughts?
 
Sorry to hear that you're experiencing problems. It's unlikely that the two issues are related -- at least, I can't think of any reason they would be.

Please tread carefully with doing things like pulling disk cartridges in and out and power cycling things. If you had a disk cartridge fail (indicated by the yellow light), then the system would proceed to rebuild the array onto the hot spare drive in the server. This process is quite robust and will pick up where it left off after a reboot, but it's also not necessarily the best idea to poke the bear.

I'm not sure what would cause a Disc Vault to think that it's empty when it isn't. That's a strange one, but our support folks may have run across this before.

Which leads me to: both of these situations are exactly the sorts of things where we would suggest that you reach out first to your dealer and then to Kaleidescape Support for assistance. They can do things like check the status of your disk array and the rebuilding process, and support can look at the system logs to see if they can determine why the vault thinks that it's empty.
 
These are definitely isolated issues.

The yellow light (or amber in K speak) indicates a disabled disk cartridge which is likely indicative of a failed hard drive. Since you have a 3U, the hot spare (a dedicated backup hard drive) has likely already rebuilt your degraded file system (depending on when the disk failure occurred and how much data needed to be rebuilt). If you haven’t done so, open the browser interface (the IP address of your server) and look for a message that a rebuild is taking place. If you see this, the file system is still degraded. I’d contact your dealer or K support to get a replacement disk cartridge and inquire about the health of the remaining hard drives. A degraded file system is nothing to take lightly considering should another drive fail in that state, you could be looking at data loss.

The other issue sounds like the vault failed to reconcile the discs during a re-inventory. In case you aren’t aware, vaults do a random check every so often to verify the identity of a single disc. If the verification is successful, nothing else happens and the vault is satisfied with the check assuming all other discs are in their correct slots. However, if the verification fails (e.g, the disc it thinks should be in the slot cannot be confirmed), a complete re-inventory of all discs Is triggered. If additional discs cannot be verified, the system removes access to the discs. You will still see disc to digital offers in the Store since the discs are “cataloged” to your account, but you won’t have access to play any of the discs. In my experience, this often occurs when a disc gets stuck somewhere inside the vault (often in the optical drive or one of the disc rollers) and subsequent discs cannot be freely moved in and out of the optical drive (and therefore the verifications fail). Sorry for the long winded explanation, but the likely outcome is the vault needs to be opened and inspected, and the rollers should be cleaned. It looks like K has those instructions here:

Good luck!
Andy


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Excellent answer from Andy. Let me just add: contact your dealer &/or support first. If there was an inventory failure, it will be in the system logs. If there was some other failure, that will be in the system logs. You can save yourself a lot of time and trouble by confirming a diagnosis first.
 
Mike is right to contact your dealer/support before you do anything else. I was just trying to prepare your for what your likely to hear.

By the way, I love your account name “the dude”. The Big Labowski is one of my favorites.

giphy.gif



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Thank you all for the replies. Just adding a response in case anyone searches the forums after experiencing something similar.

My dealer and K Support have confirmed the 2 issues are separate. I have a failing drive that needs to be replaced on the server.

As for the vault, K Support removed the vault and re-added it to the system, which got it working properly for imports. Unfortunately, the vault is still unable to successfully eject discs and only a replacement of the vault will get it fully operational.

Since I don't need the discs, I'm going to see if I can get by with just inserting the discs into the vault and never attempting to eject any, ever, hah! :) That sounds better than purchasing another vault.
 
I remove the facia from my disc vault when ejecting discs. It works every time when I do that. With the facia installed it becomes random whether a disc will eject or not.
 
I remove the facia from my disc vault when ejecting discs. It works every time when I do that. With the facia installed it becomes random whether a disc will eject or not.
How do you remove the facia? I have tugged on it but not too hard as I am afraid to break it. For some reason I have some DVD disks that won't eject but BR discs eject every time! Thanks!
 
It clips in. You might find if you pull one edge (left or right) just slightly away from the disc vault it will bring the disc slot into a better alignment and the discs will eject reliably every time. Failing that just remove the whole facia. You do need to apply some force to release the clips. Don't tug it, apply a smooth action with increasing force and it will eventually let go. Do one side first, when that releases do the other side. The facia is surprisingly heavy, don't drop it.
 
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