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Re: DL360 G3 Drive failure

 
Francesco Novelli
Occasional Advisor

DL360 G3 Drive failure

I have a DL360G3 server with only one 36Gbytes drive on the SmartArray 5i controller.
The drive is becoming unsafe, i have bad blocks and also a message when the drive is initialized.
So I ask for a replacement and a new 36Gbytes drive arrived.
I installed the new drive in the only free slot available, created a second RAID0 array with the new disk, booted the server with norton ghost cd and cloned the partition.
Then I removed the bad drive from 1st slot, swapped the second and powered on the server.
The controlled said the position of the drive is wrong, the server won't boot and also erased the drive.
What are the correct operations to back up the fault drive over a good one, without loss of data?
Thanks in advance.
6 REPLIES 6
sandeep_raman
Honored Contributor

Re: DL360 G3 Drive failure

ramesh_naik_
Esteemed Contributor

Re: DL360 G3 Drive failure

Hi sede,

The first thing here was when you created a RAID array, you could have just replaced the faulty hdd with a new one instead of swapping the newly created hdd into the faulty hdd slot.

This would change the position of the hdd and there is a high chance of data loss.

You must ensure that you should not remove the drive in the working condition to any other slot especially when you have only 2 drives with RAID configuration.

Regards,
rmn
Francesco Novelli
Occasional Advisor

Re: DL360 G3 Drive failure

According to the drive replacement guide, it seems there is no way.
The manual says that on a RAID0 environment, when the fault drive is the system drive, you can only backup the data over another drive, then replace the bad drive and reinstall the O.S.
By my side it seems very strange that is impossible to clone the faulty drive over a new one.
What I'd like to do it's very easy on a desktop/workstation enivironment.
When you have a predictable fault on a common IDE drive, you can buy a new one, attach it on a free IDE channel position, clone the old drive over the new one using a tool like Ghost or DriveImage, then replace the faulty drive and the PC is fully functional again.
I wonder why I can't do the same in a single drive RAID0 Smart Array 5i environment.
Thanks to anyone is trying to help me.
sandeep_raman
Honored Contributor

Re: DL360 G3 Drive failure

Is the ide disk on the desktop/workstation in Raid 0?
Afaik, they are not part of a raid,perhaps that 's the key.

SRH
Francesco Novelli
Occasional Advisor

Re: DL360 G3 Drive failure

Yes you're right, the diffrence between the two scenarios, is that you must create an array to attach the drive to the Smartarray 5i controller, so the drive is identified by the controller and you cannot change the position.
But I suppose that could exist a trick to perform a quick cloning of the fault drive.
Thanks again for your kindly reply.
Shayne Heidemann
Regular Advisor

Re: DL360 G3 Drive failure

If the old drive is still working then....

1. Install the new drive
2. Migrate the raid from 0 to 1 and allow it to complete the mirror
3. reboot
4. Remove faulty drive and repalce with new drive (Yes it will complain on the first boot)
5. Migrate the raid 1 to 0

Job done.