Proliant RAID 1 Copies Blank Drive

[mooreted]

I have a Proliant ML110 Gen 9 server with Server 2012 R2 installed. I shut the server down to make a backup of the OS disk. The server has two drives in RAID1 . I put a blank drive in and booted to Smart Array administrator. Waited for it to build the array. When it was done building the array it turns out that it copied the blank drive rather than the data drive. Now I have two blank drives.

How does that happen? Does the data drive have to be on SATA1 and the blank on SATA2? Why would it build an array from a blank hard drive?

[Jimmy Vance]

RAID 0 is stripping, basically it takes the drives and makes them into one large disk, there is no redundancy. If one disk in a RAID 0 fails usually all data is lost. RAID 1 is mirroring. Drive 2 is a mirror copy of drive 1, if one of the drives fails you lose no data. Generally you can remove one disk as a 'backup', insert a new disk and the mirror will rebuild. Depending on what controller is used, there are procedures to properly break and rebuild a mirror.

[mooreted]

Sorry, I meant RAID 1. I will see if I can edit my post.

[mooreted]

The controller is a Dynmic Smart Array B140i.

I can't seem to find much in the way of documentation on it.

[Jimmy Vance]

I haven't tried the break and rebuild option on a 'B' series controller. I know it works well on the 'P' series Smart Array. I would assume it works the same on the 'B" series controller.

I generally follow the manual method on page 4 of this document

http://h20566.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c00378986&lang=en-us&cc=us

[mooreted]

The problem with that method is it requires a SAAP license.

[mooreted]

I have not tried the manual method by pressing F2. That might work.

[mooreted]

It might help to know how I made my blank drives: Using a USB adapter I opened an admin CMD and did:

DISKPART

LIST DISK

SELECT DISK 2

CLEAN