SSA - how do i save the boot disk data when changing from hba mode to smart array mode

[deufel]

Greetings,

My client has a DL380 Gen9 that had a small SSD added in for testing. CentOS 7 was installed and my customer began working to configure the OS. He recently requested that I install a RAID5 array comprised of four 1TB drives. When I got into SSA, I found that the P440ar was in HBA mode. The SSA says that if I change to RAID mode, the boot drive will become unavailable.

Is there any way to switch the P440ar from HBA Mode to RAID Mode and keep the boot SSD? The user really doesn't want to have to start over.

Thanks...

Cheers,

Dan

[parnassus]

An alternative way could be to leave the HP Smart Array P440ar set in HBA mode as it is now and then let the Centos 7 OS - which is installed on the SSD drive - to build and manage remaining (non-OS/non-bootable) 1TB disk drives as a new RAID x Array - with the RAID x level you desire (as example, RAID 6 using all 4 disks) - through the mdadm tool (that can be done via OS's CLI or via OS's GUI).

That procedure (an example [*] here) should be pretty straightforward and, doing that, you will not touch any HP Smart Array P440ar controller's setting nor anything related to OS disk [**] (which continue to be the one bootable) since the current OS will be the manager for that new software RAID Array on your non-OS disks.

[*] Note that, on other how-tos, GPT is used to prepare each whole disk that be member of the Array.

[**] Note that you will need a tiny edit on the the fstab (/etc/fstab) to include the newly created mdx device(s).