DX360G2 RAID 5 Disk Replacement

[Sorin_9]

I have to replace the 5 disks I have in a RAID 5 configuration with larger sizes. Can I just replace the disks one by one and rebuild the array after each time? I'm trying to go from 72GB drives to 300GB drives each (SCSI360, hot swap-able). If not, what would be the alternative? I'm trying to avoid to rebuild the whole system. Also this is a critical mission Server, so the down-time is important. I'm afraid that the controler (5i) will rebuild the array of the same original size (72G).
Thank You.

[Chris Grasske · Accepted solution]

I have just carried out the same thing going from 3x9GB drives to 3x36GB drives. Swapping one at a time nearly worked. The first two worked well, the server ran perfectly. After the rebuild of the third, the a new logical drive was created and this then became the boot partition with no operating system. This might well have just been me not being an expert, and pressing the wrong buttons, but after restoring from tape, the extra capacity is now working well. My advice - be careful.

[Sorin_9]

Chris,
Thank you for alerting me on the possibility of something going wrong at the last drive. Of course there is alwas the pssibility of something going wrong at any time, but I wouldn't exepect to have the boot disk changed just like that. So you had to restore everything from tapes anyway, at the end. Did you have to reinstall the OS (I'm using Win 2000 Server) after finishing the Array building and before restoring from tapes?
Thanks

[Chris Grasske]

Sorin,
WHilst trying to work out how to get the disks to boot, I tried re-initializing the raid controller. This wiped all the information on the disks, so I had to re-install the windows 2000 server operating system and then retore from tape. I am currently trying to re-install the previous drives to restore some information that was not on the tapes. I have got to the same point with a flashing cursor on the top left of the screen, which I am trying to solve. One thing not to do in HP Netraid configuration is anything in the initialisation section, as this re-configures the scsi.

[Sorin_9]

Chris,
Thank you very much for your help. I did it yesterday and it worked fine, in my case. I replaced one disk at a time (it took 1.5 Hr per disk) and at the end all I had to do was partition the extraspace to the maximum size, apply the signatures and format it. There was no downtime at all. The only small glitch was that I couldnt format more than 860 GB because that's the maximum capacity the RAID controller would recognize. Other than that, everything was fine.
Thanks again.