Proliant RAID Question

[William E Howard]

Trying to come up with a simple, fast way of taking a Proliant that has Windows installed on a single hard drive, and without reinstall putting a second drive in there and making it into a RAID 1 array. I've run into this situation on both DL380's and BL460's where it would be useful to do this at client sites, but don't know of a way to do so off the top of my head.

Forgive me if this double posts, first one just hung for 10 minutes before I closed out.

[KarloChacon · Accepted solution]

hi

if your servers have right now RAID 0 you can add a second drive and do the migration.

I mean between RAID Levels if you have a JBOD that will not work.

see the attached file .doc to follow the steps.

just a reminder I don't which servers you're talking and the controller they have but some controller will require BBWC to do the expand process (explained in the document) as well BBWC for the migration option, this applies for example P400 Controller

I hope this can help you
anything else just let us know
regards

[~sesh]

If you have similar Array Controller (HP Smart Array Controller(s)) installed, the you can change between the RAID levels, for e.g. from RAID 0 to RAID 1.

However, if you have installed Windows on single hard drive without selecting a RAID set, then getting that to span 2 drives would be tricky. The smart array controller may try to stripe / mirror the drive, but initialization of the array will wipe out data from the hard drive.

If you need to get Windows installed on different servers quickly, then you could try imaging software like Norton Ghost, or HP RDP (Rapid Deployment Pack).

[William E Howard]

Primarily I'm interested in doing this on the xw460c Blade Workstation. If they are ordered with just 1 hard drive, HP ships with XP installed on that drive. I have had a couple customers now ask me how they can migrate that to a RAID 1 (after ordering a second hard drive) without having to reimage the machine.

The xw460c has an e200 Controller, so pretty low end, and usually has no bbwc if they just ordered one hard drive. I may just have to test this against one of my blade workstations for testing.

Karlo, great document, thanks! This will be very useful.

a d r i c, I'm pretty sure HP installs to a single drive RAID 0, but that is something I will definitly have to double check before I try to migrate. Thanks!