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GiulianoUM

3 Posts

21928

September 12th, 2005 15:00

Breaking hardware disk mirror to duplicate a system

I have two identical PowerEdge 2850s with mirrored 146 GB drives using the PERC 4e/Di onboard RAID controller.  I have loaded VMWare ESX server on one box and would like to duplicate the setup on another box (for DR, etc.).  Does anyone have a step-by-step process to go into the RAID controller BIOS (cntrl-M) and fail one drive so I can rebuild the mirror with a blank 146 GB.  Then with the second good drive that I pulled out, rebuild the array on the second server so I can get an identical image.  I can shut down the servers, but keeping the data is the most importatant point.  Thanks in advance for your help.

GiulianoUM

3 Posts

September 12th, 2005 17:00

Thanks Rapco, but I tried that.  I wound up almost hosing my system because the first server did not seem to rebuild after removing drive 0:1 and installing a new hard drive.  Dell tech support said I had to fail the drive first and then attempt to rebuild, but I wanted to see if there was a white paper or discussed procedure that will guide me step-by-step so I can minimize the possible loss of data.  Thanks for the response though.

rapco

2 Intern

 • 

399 Posts

September 12th, 2005 17:00

GiulianoUM: Try this own your own risk
 
 
Turn off both servers, in the donor server take out the drive 0:1 (2nd HDD), and put it in the same slot in the other server, then put the blank HDD that use to be in the 2nd server in the donor server to let it rebuilt, then leave the other server to rebuilt the 2nd HDD too.
 
*** DO BACKUPS FIRST ***
 

pcmeiners

6 Operator

 • 

1.8K Posts

September 12th, 2005 19:00

A bit long winded but a safe procedure, for raid 1 arrays...
 

GiulianoUM

3 Posts

September 13th, 2005 13:00

Thank you PCMeiners.

I have a more explicit documentation for the future.  So far things have worked well.  Thanks again for everyone's help.

FROM PERC BIOS:

Go into the Ctrl-M on the Perc 4e/di during POST. Go to Objects, Physical drive, and press enter on hard drive 1. Choose "Force Offline" from the menu. At this point escape all the way out of the Perc bios, shut the server down, and swap out the drive in slot 1.

The new drive will then rebuild into the array. The alarm may come on temporarily, this is normal and should shut off once the hard drive is replaced and the rebuild begins.

If the rebuild doesn't start automatically, you can manually start the rebuild by going into the Perc BIOS, choose to Options, Physical drive, and press enter on hard drive 1. Choose "Rebuild" from the menu. If you do this option you must rebuild it from the Perc BIOS.

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