Using Raid 1 for mirroring

[Lars Oeschey]

Hi,

i have several DL380 new, RedHat 8.0 should be installed on them. Therefor I installed it on one machine, and wanted to use the mirrored system disk to easily replicate the installation to the others, but those won't boot from the mirrored disk. Inside the 5i controller the disk with the OS is marked as "replaced", and when I leave the (empty) other disk in, it wants to replicate the *empty* state to the filled disk.
Is there no way to use the raid controller for replication of data??

Lars

[Thilo Knoch · Accepted solution]

Have you tried to put the disk into the same bay of the target machine.
(If you have the mirrored disks in the bays number 0 and 1 of the source machine and you take the disk from bay 1 to the target machine, you should put it into bay 1).

If this does not work you could try the following (but no warranty)on the TARGET machine:
Remove the disks, Run the system erase utility using the Smartstart CD, switch off the machine when the erase utility says "power cycle...", insert the disk from the source machine (into the correct bay) and power on. Then the array controller should complain about a missing disk and you can insert the second (the empty) disk.
If this works, you should set the Operating System and date/time via "ROM based setup utility" before the OS starts to boot.

[John Marinov]

I've had this problem too -except it was Win2k. Don't ask.

You need to make sure that you don't change bay numbers -otherwise the array controller thinks you have a drive replacement event. More common with the smarter array controllers.

The other thing to do is to make sure that your boot device is configured to the correct controller, and not for example the NIC.

You can check the status of the array on the disk by using the array diagnostic utility off the smartstart disk.

And we're talking about cold boots.

What I was sysprep'd the recipient hardware to a matching config, pull drive 0 from the donor machine, place it in drive bay 0 of the recipient machine while it was powered down. Apply power.