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8 Posts
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10873
July 29th, 2005 15:00
Restore a RAID 1 hard drive array?
Hello,
When I first bought my new 8400 Dimension computer it came with two 160 GB hard drives, in a RAID 1 array (mirroring). Its been alright but I was wondering, suppose in a few months my hard drive gets really cluttered up with programs and whatever and I would like to restore my hard drive. Dell did not send me a Windows Installation disk nor any driver installation disks, except for my sound blaster sound card software disk. How do I restore my computer without a disk? do i get these files off my other Raid hard drive? If so, how do i do this?
On another note, if one of my raid drives fail, do i just switch the computer off, and switch the two hard drive cables around?
Thank you for your help,
Tascrafts..
ejn63
9 Legend
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87.5K Posts
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July 29th, 2005 17:00
If one of the drives fails, the system should still boot. Go into the Matrix RAID utility on the system, deactivate the dead drive, shut down, install the new one, and the system should come back up and reconstruct the mirror.
TomXPS
1.3K Posts
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July 29th, 2005 18:00
I beleive there is a option to create the OS CD. Beleive you can only run it once, but it may be something you want to do.
shesagordie
10 Elder
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46K Posts
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July 29th, 2005 19:00
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kb/en/document?dn=1091713&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19
HDDChallenged
7 Posts
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July 29th, 2005 23:00
Just a word of caution, about a month ago, my Dell 8400, only about 8 months old, failed because of the port 0 Raid drive. The port 2 drive (the secondary Raid drive) did not reboot the computer. In the end, I had to replace the failed port 0 drive and rebuild the port 2 drive. I have questioned Dell as to a reliable way to test that the Raid back-up will work, but have not received any reliable information (I am scared of doing something with the primary drive, and the secondary not working again, leading to another complete system rebuild). I talked to one of my techies at work and he said I should turn the computer off; disconnect the cable from the primary drive; and restart. If operating properly, the secondary drive should reboot the computer. At this point, I should be able to shut down the computer, reconnect the initial cable, and be able to rebuild the array. But like I said, I'm gun-shy about doing this in case I end-up losing both drives again.
glen
njarif
21 Posts
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July 29th, 2005 23:00
HDDChallenged
7 Posts
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July 30th, 2005 00:00
That's exactly what happened to mine. Unfortunately, if you can believe this, my drive 2 failed before the new drive came. I ended up replacing one and rebuilding the other. I had the error message for a few hours, but then the second one failed too. I didn't have to replace, just rebuild.
glen
tascrafts
8 Posts
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July 30th, 2005 01:00