ML 350 G5 Upgrade of the HDs

[James Adgate]

I have a ML 350 G5 with the SATA drives in the hot swap cage/array.

I'm trying to upgrade the hard drives to a larger drive size via a bit sector copy of the source drive to a repacement SATA drive. I cloned the source system partition (boot drive) in the array to a replacement drive and then swapped the source with the replacement, but the replacement drive won't boot, even though it is an extact copy (but slightly larger - moving from 250 gigs to 500 gigs) of the source drive in terms of the files, boot sector, etc.

Can anyone point me to a way to troubleshoot this (BIOS settings, Array settings)

The hot swap cage is setup so that the first drive (leftmost) is a system drive (bootable) and 3 other drives in the cage are setup in RAID 5.

Thanks,

Jim

[Michael A. McKenney]

How did you clone it? Did you point to it in the Boot area of the CMOS? Did you place it back in the same position as the old drive in the enclosure?

[James Adgate]

Michael-

I used a hardware device that duplicates from a source to destination drive (its a forensic device that does a sector by sector copy so source and destination drives are exact duplicates).

The whole point of this exercise is to avoid a reinstallation of the OS etc b/c of an upgrade to a larger drive.

The replacement drive is seated in the same array slot as the source drive. The lights for both drives are green after the initial start up and diagnostic check. I swapped the source drive back into the same bay and the system booted back up with no errors/problems.

Thanks for your response.

Best,

Jim

[Michael A. McKenney]

It probably did not properly clone the boot sector and boot files on that drive.

You have four drives? Is first, a non-RAID drive with the OS or are all four in RAID 5?

[James Adgate]

<<>>

I can't see how that would be the case if the replacement is a sector by sector copy of the original. Would the BIOS have some issue with a larger drive?

<<>>

1st drive - set to be boot drive, it is not RAID 5. Just a drive in the cage, no redundancy

drives 2-4 setup for RAID 5 in the HP RAID management software. Windows sees drives 2-4 as just 1 drive, so its handled all at the hardware level, no software RAID.

Later,

Jim

[Michael A. McKenney]

So you have

First: OS only, no RAID
2-3: RAID 5

Go into the CMOS and see if the Boot order has changed from that drive.

I have seen cloning software not work on a server.

Does it attempt to boot from that drive? Boot from the Windows CD to a recovery console and check to see if the hard drive has files on it. Do you see the boot.ini, ntldr, and other system files you might need to use

dir /ah from command prompt to see hiddent files.

[James Adgate]

Went into the BIOS and re-set the boot drive. However, this erased the other RAID 5 array I had setup and I had to it set back up in the HP management software once I was able to boot up in Windows. Not a good solution as there could have been data loss. I'm not at all impressed with the way HP's boot drive configuration works (or does not work) and teh fact that it forces you to set this up to work only on a drive in the Hot plug cage. This combined with the fact that you cannot boot off of the PATA drive that comes with this unit really sucks.

Later,

Jim