Reference Guide

Saving SupportAssist Data to a USB Flash

Drive Tech Note

If the Storage Center is not configured to send, or is unable to send SupportAssist data to the

SupportAssist server, you can save the SupportAssist data to a USB flash drive and then send the data to

Dell Technical Support Services. Use Enterprise Manager to save the SupportAssist Data to the USB flash

drive.

Revision History

Document number: 3DR2P

Revision Date Description

A00 April 2015 Initial Release

A01 October 2015 Corrected preparation and saving steps

USB Flash Drive Requirements

The flash drive must meet the following requirements to be used to save SupportAssist data:

• USB 2.0

• Minimum size of 4 GB

Prepare the USB Flash Drive

When the USB flash drive contains a file named phonehome.phy, the Storage Center recognizes that the

drive will be used to save SupportAssist data.

Prerequisites

• This procedure requires a USB flash drive that contains a partition table with one partition formatted

with an MSDOS/FAT32 filesystem. USB devices may come from the vendor formatted with or without

partitions. Use Windows disk management or other third-party tools to create a partition if the flash

drive does not have an MSDOS/FAT32 partition.

• The USB flash drive cannot contain any other .phy marker files.

About this task

NOTE: To save SupportAssist data from both controllers, you must use two separate USB flash

drives.

Steps

1. Create a text file and name it: phonehome.phy changing the file type from .txt to .phy.

2. Save the file to the root of the MSDOS/FAT32 filesystem on the flash drive.

3. Insert the USB drive into a port on the lead controller.

4. To save SupportAssist data from both controllers, insert a second USB flash drive into the peer

controller.

Document Number: 3DR2P

Rev. A01

2015 - 10

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Saving SupportAssist Data to a USB Flash Drive Tech Note If the Storage Center is not configured to send, or is unable to send SupportAssist data to the SupportAssist server, you can save the SupportAssist data to a USB flash drive and then send the data to Dell Technical Support Services. Use Enterprise Manager to save the SupportAssist Data to the USB flash drive.
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5. Wait five minutes to allow the controllers to recognize the USB flash drive. 6. Check the Storage Center logs in the Dell Storage Client to verify that Storage Center recognized the USB flash drive. Save SupportAssist Data to the USB Flash Drive Using Enterprise Manager Use the Send SupportAssist Data Now dialog box in Enterprise Manager to save data to the USB flash drive. Prerequisites • Prepare the USB flash drive according to Prepare the USB Flash Drive.
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Figure 1. SupportAssist error Troubleshooting SupportAssist USB Issues Follow one of the following procedures to resolve issues sending SupportAssist data to a USB flash drive. Before sending the USB flash drive to SupportAssist, verify that Storage Center successfully wrote SupportAssist data to the drive. After sending SupportAssist data to the USB flash drive, the drive should contain multiple files. 1. Verify that the USB flash drive contains the SupportAssist data. a.