Database failed message and rebuilding the database

Owned by Anand Rajaraman
Nov 28, 2019
3 min read

Symptom

A message displayed locally indicates that the database has failed, or a message displayed when trying to sign in to remote SystemManager states that the "database has encountered a problem" or "database failed". It will be similar to this:

Solution

This message appears when the database has failed. This means that the system encountered a serious problem, attempted to recover itself, and wasn't able to automatically recover. Database failures can occur because of abrupt power loss, or due to drive corruption that was recovered but with significant damage to the database. When the database fails, all data is lost on the system. There is no need for an RMA in these cases, unless the database reset steps below are unsuccessful, which would indicate a deeper underlying root cause requiring an RMA to investigate.

  • The user can reset the system to factory defaults and reprogram it

  • Database failures result in losing all data, including users, so they will need to login as techrep to reprogram

Before putting in the engineer password and resetting the database, please run the chkdsk operation on all three partitions on the unit:

  1. Go to the Maintenance Tab and select "Emergency Repair".

  2. Select "Run Disk Self Diagnostic" and in the "Drives" section enter "C,S,X"

  3. Click “Repair”.

For local system:

  • With a monitor, keyboard, and mouse plugged into the 3VR:

  1. Type in the 3VR password of the day. (The user name should be 3VR or 3vr.)

  2. The rebuild will take up to 20 minutes.

  3. When it is finished, the system will reboot and should return to the Sign In screen.

For remote system:

  1. Enter 3VR as the user name.

  2. Leave the password field blank.

  3. Click Sign In. A box will pop up asking for the Engineer password.

  4. Enter the 3VR password and click OK.

  5. The  Maintenance Mode message will pop up and state that the database has failed.

  6. The tech should click Sign In to sign in using Maintenance Mode.

  7. In System Manager, click the 3VR logo in the top-left corner and select Erase and Rebuild Database. (Note: If there is no option to Erase and Rebuild Database have him/her sign out of SM and back in.)

  8. The rebuild will take up to 20 minutes, after which the system should reboot and return to the Sign In screen.

To reconfigure the system on a P-Series / S-Series:

The settings can be restored from the flash backup. Settings are backed up nightly. To restore the settings after the rebuild:

  • For local system:

    1. Select Restore Settings from the Administration Console.

    2. The user will be prompted to restore the settings from the last automatic backup and click OK.

  • For Remote system:

    1. Click the 3VR logo on the corner of System Manager.

    2. In the drop-down, have the user select Restore SmartRecorder Settings from File… 
      This option is only available to the user is there is not a static drive failure, and the user has logged in with level 4 access.