Smart Array unmirror failed drive

[CA1191011]

I have a 5i integrated smart array controller with 2 drive bays and 2 72 GB drives installed, setup as raid 1. My question is if I down the system and pull out one of the mirrored drives, why can't I then umirror the remaining drive? I essentially want to boot on Drive 0 and set Drive 1 on the shelf as a spare, then put in another drive as Drive 1 and have the space available on it for a new partition. I need to do this to perform an upgrade on some software, after the upgrade I will remirror the drive, and in the mean time I will have a good working boot drive if the upgrade failes. As far as I can tell the raid 1 status needs to be healthy in order to break the mirror but if I do break the mirror with it healthy deleates the partition on the drive I want to pull out and use as a boot drive if I have any upgrade problems.

If I just pull the drive 1 out I can't put in a new drive temporarily for data storage during the upgrade (since the array controller will start remirroring to it)

[Oleg Koroz]

You can do that â power down server â take off drive â accept recovery at post and add new drive when system up and running.
If you screw your future array with updates make sure you slide drive back to same slot where it been used.i did few times and it