Xserve hard drives all disappeared

[fOZf8]

Sorry if this is redundant I can't find anything relevant via search.

I have an Intel xserve I believe 2010 or 2012....it's 8 core 3ghz xeons. I e been using it for years even though it sounds like an airplane coming in for an out of control landing. Regardless it does everything I need...

Turned it on a few days ago and got the folder with a question mark...no OS found. I booted off of an install disk, no hard drives found. I have 3 1tb drives in it working great for years, and then suddenly this.

I roved the drives and plugged them into a newer OS Mac, ran first aid on them all, particularly the system drive, repla Ed and nothing.

My guess is whatever controls the hard drives, like a southbridge...speaking in PC terms, has stopped working or lost communication. Does anybody have a suggestion for what might be wrong specifically? What piece of hardware internally should I be looking at or messing with?

thanks in advance if anybody has suggestions, or am I stuck just buying an early stage Intel Mac pro (never going for another xserve, way too loud). Son e we're talking Mac budgets here, I can't afford anything fancy, but the 8 core xserve with a butt ton of ram work incredibly great as a music DAW, I could punish it with oodles of plugins and tracks and it just ate it all up fine. Unconventional use yes, but like I said, I'm on a very small budget due to hard times.

 

[DeltaMac]

I think you are a little off with the age of your xserve. The only Xserve with a 3 GHz (dual 4-core) CPU is the early 2008 Xserve. The newest (last) Xserve is the 2009. So, "2010 or 2012" is a little wishful thinking. But, maybe you bought this xserve during that time, as the 2009 was sold new until sometime in 2011.
There is the drive interconnect backplane board. All the drive modules plug in to that. Be sure to try removing all the drive modules, then test with each module, one at a time. You might get response with one or two, and maybe find out that one or two of the drive modules are bad. And, here's a possible source for the drive interconnect board. https://www.macpartsonline.com/661-...pci-x-xserve-2-8-3-0ghz-early-2008-a1246.html
Here's another source - lower cost, too.

 

[fOZf8]

thank you for the detailed information, it's the best lead I have found yet...and yes there is no doubt I mixed up the year of the model with my macbook pro which came out in 2010...I continually seem to swap the two production years in the back of my mind for some reason >>

I know my way around a pc blindfolded but not something this intricately designed, so simply knowing which board it is that I should focus on helps immensely, thank you very much for pointing it out!

 

[fOZf8]

Steve Jobs spirit must have been looking over my shoulder, in knowing what part to troubleshoot some finagling with all the connections internally something seemed to have worked and the drives all booted up back to life again, thank you!