ProLiant DL 320 Mirror Screw UP

[Oblivious]

Okay, ProLiant DL 320, 1 10 gig Maxtor, 1 10 gig SeaGate. Running NT 4.0. Setup up mirror between two, (Compaw software, 39 meg, can't mirror, C: 4095 mirrored, f: 5095 mirrored) Wanted to test falability. Pulled cable, doesn't switch to mirror. Switched cables, wont boot from mirror. Basically the mirror wont work. Any suggestions or particulars i overlooked?

[Zack Menendez]

Oblivious, huh? That's how I feel these days... but maybe I can help you. I'll try.

Just today I ran a successful "simulation" of HD failure and everything worked fine. (It's rebuilding now, as expected.) My environment was the onboard ATA RAID controller of the DL320 G2. So first, I just want to make sure you set it up right, because I was a bit confused by your description.

"C: 4095 mirrored, f: 5095 mirrored" Hmm. Not sure what you mean. When you mirror 2 drives, you should see what looks like only 1 drive in the OS but it's actually the two running identically. Do you mean that C: and F: are your partitions on the unified mirror? If so, this shouldn't be a problem.

"Pulled cable, doesn't switch to mirror." You mean you yanked one of the HD cables and rebooted? If so, then the system should have just come back with the single drive, but with warnings that one of the drives "failed." It won't come back with a "mirror" because one of the drives is gone - sorry if you know this, I just want to be sure you understand what the mirroring means.

"Switched cables, wont boot from mirror. Basically the mirror wont work." With both drives attached (and properly mirrored) you should be able to switch the cables and keep going as normal. I'm starting to wonder if the mirror is not setup correctly at the BIOS level, because if I have to guess I'd say you have the first drive set up as a master and the second isn't doing anything. What does the RAID BIOS tell you?

This is all generic RAID info, but I hope it helps somewhat. Please let me know if I can help fill in some details for you!

[Oblivious]

I was a little too obscure. The orig HD has three partitions. Compaq Util, C: and F:. These are all mirrored on another drive. There is no raid BIOS, which doesn't make sense i know, but its not there. No options to boot or setup for it. The mirror in NT Disk Admin is setup prop and should be working. Just isn't. WHen i said i pulled the cable, it was to sim HD failure. Both are on Cable select, so that shouldn't be a problem. When it boots without orig, only the mirrored drive, it acts like it cant find a boot partition on the HD.