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March 25th, 2019 18:00
Adding a single physical disk to R720
I recently acquired a PowerEdge R720 that I'm running VMWare ESXi on.
I previously had a server running ESXi without RAID and have a large hard drive that already has files on it that I can't lose.
I'm trying to add a single drive to the system without RAID so that I can add it to ESXi, but I can't seem to figure out how.
The physical drive shows up in the controller settings, but it doesn't show up in ESXi because it says ready instead of online. So, how do I mark it as online? I tried to see if I could create a new virtual disk, but that tells me that the contents of the disk will be permanently deleted. That's not an option.
If anymore info is needed please let me know.
Thanks in advance!
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Dell-DylanJ
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March 26th, 2019 07:00
Good morning,
Would you mind sharing what RAID controller you're working with? The reason I ask is because you may be able to go into the PERC BIOS and put the disk into pass-through mode. Alternatively, you could look at setting the drive as a single disk RAID 0, but it will be critical to disable the background initialization, because that initialization is what causes data losses. Regardless, I would 100% recommend making a backup of the drive, if at all possible. If not, testing with a drive where the data is disposable may be the next best thing.
KB1SPH
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March 26th, 2019 13:00
It's a PERC H710 mini. A backup is not really possible at this time as it is a 6 TB drive with a little over 4 TB full and I don't have enough space on any other drives to back it up right now. But I do have other drives I can test with. I should also mention, I'm not sure if this will make a difference, while the boot drives are SAS, the 6 TB drive is SATA connected to the SAS backplane.
KB1SPH
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March 26th, 2019 14:00
Now I feel stupid. So, I was trying to set up the drive by going through the UEFI BIOS, then going through the menus to device settings and the setting for the H710, which apparently doesn't let you skip initialization. For some reason I just tried to do it directly through the controller's configuration by pressing Crtl+R on bootup and that let me create a virtual disk as RAID 0 without initializing it.
Dell-DylanJ
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March 28th, 2019 07:00
Well, don't feel stupid. You don't know what you don't know, right? At any rate, I'm very glad you were able to get it online!