ML110 controller mistake

[Chris Mosentine]

Hi all:  First off I will tell you I screwed up.  This weekend I installed Windows 2008 R2 on a virgin ML110 with one HD.   The two 1 TB drives we ordered are on backorder so we went ahead and installed to a 250GB drive temporarily.  When I booted the server everything came up and I was able to isntall the server just fine.  Only later did I realize the the onboard array controller comes disabled be default, so the server is actually running off of the onboard SATA controller.

So now I will have to go back and enable the array controller.  The problem I face is I think this will probably result in the existing HD getting blown away and the controller will probably need to setup logical drives on the HD.  Is this the case?  Si there an easy way around this issue?

If not Plan B will will be clone the existing drive before enabling the controller and then restore from the clone backup.  I have never doen this and could use some advise on cloning software (free is better) and thinhgs that will get me in trouble.

Thanks, Chris.

[Jimmy Vance]

The embedded SATA controller is also the RAID controller. The controller is software RAID. Once enabled in the BIOS, you need to install a driver for the RAID to function properly

[Chris Mosentine]

Thanks for the reply.  As I normally work with higher end controllers, forgive me if this is a somewhat stupid question.  Typically when I setup a RAID on HP controllers, I run ACU in order to create the array and logical drives.  This results in the existing drives being wiped to create the array.  Are you saying this is NOT THE CASE with the controller in the ML110 box?

[Jeffrey D Chard]

Chris

I have the same problem, I have a ML110G7 wiih the embeded raid controler.

I also did not realise that the 110G would default to SATA on the install.  I  would like to convert 2 (250Gb) to raid 1 (for protections), and 2 ( more recently acquired 1TB) to raid 0 (for performance and large capacity).

the 250GB is the boot drive with Server 2008 R2 with SP1 installed.

My reading suggests that that I can use the ctrl a rom boot software to

1. a "build" the  Raid 1 250GB

2. a "migrate" the Riad 0 1TB drives

My concern is whether system will boot off the "built" 250GB drives  particularly where I beieve that I may need to install a raid driver.

If you could give me an  update on your experience I would be appreciative.