Moving 4 Hard disks (Configured as RAID 5) to a different server

[Hanson_2]

Hi!

On one of our company severs (ProLiant ML370 G1), 2 hard drives are configured as mirror set to host Windows 2000 server SP2 OS and 4 hard drives (18GB each) are configured as RAID 5.

As the 4x18GB RAID 5 hard disks are fully written, we have to replace them with 4 new hard disks with bigger capacity (72GB each)and have them configured as RAID 5.

However after we have done the replacement and restored data onto the new hard disks, we found that some data is still missing.

We plan to install the old 4x18GB hard disks onto another server so that we can copy the missing data across. That server is also a ProLiant ML370 G1 server and currently it has only 2 hard disks configured as RAID 1. If we install the 4x18GB hard disks onto the server, create a new RAID 5 array, would the data on the 4x18GB hard disks be lost ? If so, what is the best way to recover the missing data from the 4x18GB hard disks?

[Alexander Sakharov · Accepted solution]

Hi,

simply plug these old disks into another server, power on, SmartArray will read RAID configuration from disks - and you will be able to copy your data.

If you create new RAID5 on these disks, your data WILL BE LOST.

HTH,
Alexander

[Alexander Sakharov]

One more thing, after booting W2K on the another server, you should "import foreign disks" using Disk Administrator to make your old NTFS partitions accessible to another operating system. You might have to reset folder/file permissions on this disk.

Alexander