Mirrored Drive

[bill jones_2]

Have a Compaq Proliant server with a Smart Array 5i card installed and have a simple question about rebuilding a mirrored drive that I can't find an answer to. Pulled drive out of slot 1 prior to doing a software upgrade, upgrade went bad and pulled the drive out of slot 0 and placed the drive from slot 1 back in slot 1. To rebuild the drive in slot 0 do I need to initialize the drive prior to putting the drive back in or do I just boot the server with the both drives and it will automatically rebuild the drive in slot 0? Thank You

[Vincent Fleming]

I would boot the server with the drive in slot 1 (the drive that came out of slot 1, also). Once it's been written to, it'll be "newer" than the drive from slot 0. you should be able to then insert the drive in slot 0 and it should rebuild to it. (the drive in slot 1 will be "master")

Good luck,

Vince

[David Holbrook]

A little more info would help. What OS are you using, and are the "boot" and "system" drives part (partitions or logical drives)of a total array of all the drives in the system or are they individual drives under the controller but not part of an array (were drive 0 and drive 1 two actual full physical drives)? You imply that the system boots to drive 0 as the C: drive, and drive1 was another physical hard drive, not a partition.

Assuming you have two individual physical drives as a mirror set, then you will need to have a modified boot.ini file on a boot floppy to point the system to boot from the remaining mirror boot/system drive (Drive1).

To rebuild a mirror which uses two individual drives, you must have a blank unformatted drive (drive 0). Boot to the old mirror (drive1), break the old mirror. Shut down, add the Drive 0, boot back to drive1, erase the old drive0, and recreate the mirror to the blank drive (drive0). The odd quirk of this is that the drive 1 is then the master drive of the new mirror that the boot.ini points to, and you must fix your rescue boot disk boot.ini file to reflect this new configuration.

David