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Topic: flashing exclamation mark ("!") on DTS XD20 front panel

Scott Norwood
Film God

Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99

posted 05-30-2019 07:25 PM

After replacing a failing hard disk with a pair of SSDs and re-installing the DTS software (version 2.2.06) I am now greeted with a flashing "!" (exclamation mark in a box) on an XD20 that was formerly in working order. It appears to the left of the "RAID OK" box in the lower-right corner of the front panel. Everything else displays properly.

What does this mean and how does one troubleshoot it?

Everything appears to work fine, the newly configured RAID shows as clean, and the unit reads timecode and plays audio without problems.

The next step is probably to hook up a monitor and try actually logging into the device to see if there are any log messages. That will not happen until the weekend.

No network is connected, and there is nothing obvious in the front-panel menu that would indicate what is wrong.

Thoughts? Am I missing something totally obvious here? If it weren't for the annoying flashing "!," I would assume that nothing is wrong.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 05-30-2019 10:17 PM

I have a dim memory of encountering this from my days at the Egyptian. If that memory is still correct, it is caused by the two RAID drives not being of the exact same model (both of the same capacity is not enough; they have to be the same model).

This was when I was upgrading an XD-20 that had been running in non-RAID configuration to RAID by adding the second drive. Needless to say, it wasn't the same model as the one already in there. When I got an identical pair in there, all was good.

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Scott Norwood
Film God

Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99

posted 05-31-2019 01:51 AM

Thanks. Interesting. Both SSDs are the same model, purchased at the same time, but I suppose that it is possible that they have different firmware. I will check that.

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Scott Norwood
Film God

Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-01-2019 07:14 PM

Update on this: the error is reproducible with both mechanical disks (Hitachi Ultrastars) and SSDs (Samsung DCTs), both singly and in pairs. Retrieving the error logs from the DTS box (specifically, xd10system.log and smart.log) indicate that the DTS box is mis-reading the disk temperature:

[CODE]
[3] [Jun 1 17:41:02] CM: syscheck: disk 0 temp is out of limits: 1310762C [29]
[3] [Jun 1 17:41:03] CM: syscheck: disk 1 temp is out of limits: 1310757C [29]
[3] [Jun 1 17:42:04] CM: syscheck: disk 0 temp is out of limits: 1310762C [29]
[3] [Jun 1 17:42:04] CM: syscheck: disk 1 temp is out of limits: 1310757C [29]
[3] [Jun 1 17:43:05] CM: syscheck: disk 0 temp is out of limits: 1310762C [29]
[3] [Jun 1 17:43:05] CM: syscheck: disk 1 temp is out of limits: 1310757C [29]
[/CODE]

Presumably, it recognizes these temperature values as being too high and flags this as an error; hence, the flashing exclamation mark. I can find no other errors in the log files, so I can only assume that the cause is the erroneous temperature reading, presumably due to a bug in either smartctl or xd10system.

The original disk was a Western Digital--perhaps WD reports its SMART data in a slightly different format. I did not have another one to use to test, but the original one does not give these errors.

The plan at this point is to assume that the error indicator is a false positive, since everything else seems to be working properly.

Thanks, Leo.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 06-01-2019 10:13 PM

I should be thanking you - you just jogged my memory.

It was a SMART problem - I guessed that the drive I used was not capable of reporting its temperature at all, and when I found a model that was after looking around online, I bought a pair of them and that made the warning go away. The reason I was remembering identical drive model for both was because after I'd found one that I'd established definitely would report the monitoring data that the XD-20 was looking for, I made sure to use two of those.

I wish I'd made more detailed notes at the time, but the pressure of work was such that I just had to fix the bug and move on.

Also if I remember correctly, if you use an IDE to SATA adapter to install a SATA drive in an XD-10, it can give you some weird error messages, too; but again, it'll still work OK.

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