Rebuilding a mirror set

[Ayman Altounji]

I have a 2 drive mirror set, drive 0 and 1. The system is using a Smart Array 431. I have created a drive rotation of 3 drives for the purpose of Disaster recovery. What I do is once a week I remove drive 1 and replace it with the next drive in the rotation and it the new drive is rebuilt with the information currently on drive 0 and thus I'm back to a mirror set.

Now here is my question: I want to do a failover test and my understanding is that I can do this by shutting down the system, removing the current 2 drive set and replacing them with the last drive from rotation set. Now I would place this single drive in slot 0 and I should be able to just boot normally and basically have the system as it was the week prior.
Remember I'm taking the week before drive 1 and placing it where drive 0 would go.
After the test was completed successfully, I should just be able to shut-down the system remove this drive and replace with the original two drives and reboot back into the current system. Compaq support feels this will work this way but I just want to verify the procedure will work.

Thanks

David

[Mark Cloutier]

Hi,

This should work fine without any problem at all according to the information?s you provided, but make sure you have a recent known to be good backup, and try to also create a fault tolerance floppy disk too ( you format a floppy disk in NT and copy to it NTLDR, NTdetect.com, and boot.ini). We can only judge this according to the Information's you provide to us, that is why I stress in good backup.

Regards.

[Ayman Altounji]

I also have a 2 drive mirror set on a Smart Array 431 with a HotSpare. This is running on a Proliant 530 with 18.2G disks. The mirrored pair is ID's 0 & 1, then there is a 3 disk Raid5 array: ID's 2, 3 & 4, and finally the spare disk ID 5. The spare disk is shared. I have removed ID 0 and let it re-build onto the spare. When finished I inserted a NEW disk into ID 0 and let it re-store from the spare. When finished, I powered the system down, removed ID's 0 & 1 and re-fitted the original ID 0 on it's own, and booted the system. The controller initialized and told me SCSI drive ID1 was not responding and subsequently hung, before loading the O/S. This is a development system, so I tried different options. The only way I could get it to boot back into the O/S was by backing up and swapping the 2 drive set as a pair, and even that didn't always work! Does Compaq have a recommended Disaster recovery procedure using disks?
Hoping - Raffael

[Ayman Altounji]

Further to my earlier reply, I've just found an answer from Compaq earlier in this forum. Unfortunately it contradicts this current reply - clarification from Compaq would be nice.
Subject: Hardware Raid 1
Date: June 14,2001
Reply from: Sharon P (Compaq)