Identical Servers have diffrent HD Size (ML350 G4 RAID)

[Schreiber, Uwe]

Hi to everybody,

we have to identical ML350G4 Servers with RAID5 3x72GB out of the box.

We discovered a problem when testing a Veritas desaster recovery from tape. We tried to restore the tape from server1 to the 'naked' server2 and BackupExec failed because the disk is to small.

We then checked the disksize and yes its true. If we install a Win2003SBS on both servers the same way, the reported disksize is not identical.

Any explanations ?!?!?!

[Oleg Koroz · Accepted solution]

can you upload ADU report from both systems ?

[e4services]

different disks I would guess. I do not know what HP is doing these days with their OEM supplied drives, but they use to amke sure in the Firmware they had the Manufacturer flash to the drive, that they reported the same RAW size to the RAID controller, no matter when or who made the drive. It could be that one or more of the drives report differing sizes to the RAID controller, the controller will truncate them all to the same size. and then put them together.
Also it could be that one of the drives has ended up bad, producing a large amount of bad sectors for example, produce a size degradation and therefore bring the total size down.
Take a look in the BIOS RAID configuration to look at the physical drives and there reported size to the controller.

[Schreiber, Uwe]

We solved the problem!!

Thanks for the hint with the ADU. We did the report on both servers and then realised that the two raid controlers had different default values regarding the drive geometrie. One had 63 sectors and one 32 sectors which results in a slightly different size reported to the OS. And these few bits caused the problem.

Don't know why the changed the defaults?!?!

Thanks a lot for thanking us in the right direction!

Uwe

[Schreiber, Uwe]

For the solution pls see message before.