Dell 2950 Perc5

[chilled]

Hi, I have a Dell 2950 PE but it only has 1 hard drive. I need a RAID 1 confguration but the machine doesnt seem to have a raid controller installed.

I have a spare perc5 which is standard in these machine so am thinking about installing it then adding a second drive. However windows is currently installed on the single drive which uses a SATA controler straight to the motherboard.

Questiob: If I install the perc driver will the current install of windows Svr 2008 still boot.

Dell say it should be fine as the Perc5 is shipped in windows but I not sure....

any help would be good...

cheers

 

[technome]

Good question....
Older Percs could never boot a drive which came off a standard interface. Over on the Dell forum a couple of users stated they were able to attach a drive previously on a standard SATA interface to a Perc and have it come up. I tried to find the posts at the Dell forums but the search engine sucks. If it does work you would need to attach it, configure it as a raid 0, BUT under NO circumstances do use initialize it.If that works, then you would add another drive and migrate it to raid 1. You made need "interposers" to connect to the backplane.
Baring that, the easiest would be to have the standard drive on the motherboard SATA, add the Perc and new drive, configure as raid 0, clone the standard drive to the newly create raid 0 on the Perc, restart,make sure it boots to the Perc, add the old drive from the motherboard interface to the Perc, migrate from raid 0 to r1. Again interposers may be needed.

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