Breaking A Mirror (Raid 1) - How To?

[TripleJHJO]

I have a Server 2003 with an AMI MegaIDE SCSI adapter using RAID 1. There are two drives that are mirrored as one.
I have three questions:
When one of the drives go bad,
1. How do I know what drive it is bad when it fails?
2. How do I break the mirror
3. How do I replace the drive and recreate the mirror without losing any data?

Help is much appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[LawnBoy]

Are you sure that's an AMI MegaIDE? The MegaIDE is not SCSI, it's IDE. What box do you have this running on?



"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

 

[TripleJHJO]

In the Device Manager, under Disk Drives the device is:

AMI MegaIDE #00 SCSI Disk Device

It is running on an HP Proliant DL320, with Windows 2003.

 

[sha2169]

Is this a hardware or software RAID? I'm not familiar with the MegaIDE but if it's just a SCSI adapter the container was probably created in Windows. You can use Disk Mgmt in Computer Mgmt to break the mirror. The bad disk should have written an event in the Windows System Log. Once you break the mirror and replace the disk you will need to go back into Disk Mgmt to upgrade the disk to dynamic and create the mirror again.

 

[LawnBoy]

The Proliant DL320 that HP is selling now has an integrated SATA RAID controller. Without knowing what you have I can only give generic help, but here goes.

1. If the drives can be seen from outside the case (i.e. you don't have to open up the box to get at them) they will have status lights on them. Usually green is go, red is faulted, and yellow is rebuilding. If you have no status lights, you will have to go into the RAID setup utility to see which drive has failed.

2. If the drive is faulty the mirror is already broken. You would not want to do any reconfiguring at this point!

3. Simply replace the bad drive with a good one. The array should automatically rebuild itself.

hth

"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes