How to break a RAID1 Mirror DL380 integrated controller 2

[zphoria]

How to break a RAID1 Mirror DL380 integrated controller?

Can anyone tell me how to force a mirror set to break on this system. Here is what I am trying to do. I have a situation where if a server goes down I have almost no time restore from tape and don't have the finances for an HA cluster. So I would like to break the raid 1 mirror sets on this box and put 1 of the disks on a shelf in storage. Then install a new drive where the old one was and rebuild the mirror. If anything goes wrong on the system I can just shutdown pull all drives, grab the spare off the shelf boot up, get back on-line and then rebuild the mirror set from the good spare drive. Atleast that is the plan.. Is this possible? Please let me know. Thanks

 

[Sunny79]

On a compaq raid controller you do not need to break the mirror. This all is based on a hardware level and microsoft mirrors are based on a software level. If you are using a COMPAQ raid controller then you are using hardware based mirror and just need to simply pull the secondary drive out.

Good luck.

 

[zphoria]

Ok, i'll try it.

Thanks!

 

[klawson]

That hasn't worked for us. As a test last week I shut down a system with 2 discs in a mirror set. I took out 1 drive from slot 1 and rebooted. ok so far.
I then added another drive back into slot 1 to rebuild to mirror fully.
Once rebuilt I then shut the machine down again.
I then took out both drives and put in the drive I had taken out earlier back into slot 0 and booted.
All I got was the standard message stating the operating system could not be found.
Putting the last 2 drives back in I could then boot the system.

Is there anything else I should do ?

Thanks

 

[Sunny79]

My understanding of your issue:
1.Had two hardware mirrored drives scsi id0 and id1
2.Pulled drive id1 out and replaced with another drive
3.Took both drives out and put the drive id1 in the different slot for id0.
If this is the issue then it is not going to work. The drives you are plugging in and out are given a scsi id by the slot they are plugged into and you need to keep them with a consistent scsi id. This can be a problem with some controllers not supporting drive roaming, I'll explain this later in the paragraph. If you do have a controller that supports roaming then your problem is this, the Boot.ini is not facing the new OS positioning. The SCSI id has changed from id 1 to id 0 and you can try editing a boot.ini floppy to point to the location of the OS and you should have no problem.
The COMPAQ hardware procedure always works, unless you have a bad scsi controller, but what you did is something that is not a functionality of some controllers. Let me know which scsi controller you are using, depending on the type of controller you have, the controller may support drive roaming and all you have to do is edit the boot.ini file or if the controller doesn't support it then the drive will never work in a different scsi id slot.
Get back to me on the type of controller you have so I can cross-reference it for you.
Good luck. I hope this helps. If anyone doesn't understand something I said or needs clarification or instructions on something please let me know, I will try to get back with you as soon as possible.
Great being in this forum.

 

[Jpoandl]

Sunny79...can you point me to Compaq documentation with regards to this procedure? Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2000

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out

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[klawson]

Our controllers do not support roaming drives.
Since I posted we have done more work experimenting with various procedures.
If a drive is in slot 0 the machine will always boot. When we have had 1 drive in slot 1 we cannot get it to work.
Our solution is to boot off the smart array cd with both original drives in. We then take the drive out of 0 and replace with another drive which will then rebuild from the drive in slot 1. We now have a drive taken out which we can boot from. When booting we have to answer questions about failed drives but we can guarantee we boot off the drive we want rather than putting 2 drives in and hoping the controllers know which drive is correct.