How to Fix DELL PowerEdge Memory/battery problems were detected Error

If you are managing a DELL Poweredge server, you might’ve noticed the following error message on the console during system startup.

This will happen during PERC RAID Controller check.

Memory/battery problems were detected.
The adapter has recovered, but cached data was lost.
Press any key to continue.

For most part, when you press any key and continue the startup process, your system will boot-up and continue to work.

PERC Controller Battery

If the problem just happens to be with PERC battery, then when the system is running, it will try to charge the PERC battery. If it succeeds, next time when you reboot the machine, you probably might not see that error message again.

If this is an old DELL poweredge server, you might face this issue. Or, if the system was down for a while, and if you are trying to start it, the PERC controller battery might’ve lost it charge, and you might see that error message.

In that, case the PERC battery will recharge when the system is up and running.

But, in some cases, the PERC battery itself might be dead. So, you may have to replace it with a new battery.

This might help in this type of situation: How to Fix DELL PowerEdge W1228 Raid Controller Battery Capacity

Filesystem Error on Console

If it is not a PERC controller battery related issues, then you might see some other strange issues.

Sometimes if you’ve ignored the “Memory/battery problems were detected” message and continued to start the system, it might boot-up.

But, if you are running Linux on this DELL server, when it is up and running, sometimes you might see the following error message on the console. “unable to read inode block”.

sd 0:2:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
sd 0:2:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
sd 0:2:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
sd 0:2:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
EXT3-fs error (device sda1): ext3_find_entry: reading directory #5351777 offset 0
EXT3-fs error (device sda1): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block - inode=5342378, block=5341223

fsck Error on Console

When you see the above error message, one of the immediate reaction is that something is wrong with the filesystem.

If it is non-root filesystem, you can perform a fsck and see what happens.

In this case, to perform it on root filesystem, we should go to single user mode from grub as shown below.

grub append> ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet single

Then performing fsck, will do the following.

# fsck -n /dev/sda
 
Warning! /dev/sda1 is mounted.
Warning: skipping journal recovery because doing a read-only filesystem check
/ contains a file system with errors, check forced.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Error reading block 491930 (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted ..
..
Error while scanning inodes (504576): Can't read next inode
e2fsck: aborted
ext3_abort called.
EXT3-fs error (device sda1): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal

As we see here, we are still getting several filesystem related errors:

• Detected aborted journal Error
• Can’t read next inode Error
• Error while scanning inodes
• Error reading block
• etc.

This will help during this process: 10 Linux Fsck Command Examples to Check and Repair Filesystem

Auto fsck during Reboot

When you continue to reboot the system, it will do an automatic fsck on the filesystem as shown below.

Here, whereever it prompts for “Fix?”, go-ahead and say “yes”.

Free inodes count wrong (16842504, counted=16842704). Fix? yes
 
/: ****** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ******
/: ****** REBOOT LINUX ******
/: ****** WARNING: Filesystem still has errors ********
/: 48/168427567 files (2.1% non-contigous), 540989/16840128 blocks

But, this still says “Filesystem still has errors”

Respawning too fast Error

When you continue to reboot the machine, after the auto-fsck, you might see the following error message, where it is unable to execute mingetty.

INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/mingetty"
INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

Change PERC Controller Memory

Now, if you reboot the machine again, you’ll still get the following error message on the screen during the PERC controller check.

Memory/battery problems were detected.
The adapter has recovered, but cached data was lost.
Press any key to continue.

At this stage, you’ve changed the PERC battery, and you know it is not the battery problem.

But, if you continue to reboot by ignoring the message, you might still be getting all kinds of strange errors related to filesystem as shown above.

So, at this stage, it is essential that you don’t ignore the above memory/battery problem and continue any further.

Change your PERC controller memory, and reboot the machine.

In most situations, this should solve the problem, and you shouldn’t see the “Memory/battery problems were detected” error message.

This should also stop giving all those strange filesystem related error messages. In this example scenario we got all those error message because of bad corrupted PERC controller memory.