RPA Factory Reset

I ran into a situation recently where the need arose to effectively “factory reset” an Generation 5 EMC RecoverPoint Appliance (Gen 5 RPA). In my case, I had one RPA where the local copy of the password database had become corrupted, but the other three systems in the environment were fine. There was nothing physically wrong with the box, I just wanted to revert it back to new and treat it like a replacement unit from EMC, and rejoin it back to the local cluster.

From what I could find, EMC had no documented procedure on how to do this. So after finding a blog entry and EMC Communities post (that individually did not help) here it is:

The key points here are the bits about Port 60/64 Emulation. If you don’t do this, the RAID BIOS will load to a black screen and take you nowhere. Likewise, if you leave it enabled your RecoverPoint OS may not install correctly.