outsmarting the smart array

[enigma174]

Hi,
we have a compaq proliant ML350 with the smart array 341 controller.
But the logical drives, are assigned in the wrong order. What happened is we had 2 logical drives (1 and 2) on a RAID-5 from 3 physical disks, working fine. Then I installed a new disk, (officially RAID-0) which worked fine as well.
The trouble started when i removed the 3 disk array so i could test some things without stuffing all the company data. That worked fine, but the Array Controller saw it happen and compleatly reconfigured the Array, numbering the drive on the single disk Drive 1.
When i swapped the disks around for business the next day, the controller detected that the single disk was "faulty", failed it, and added the logical drives with the real configuration as drives 2 and 3.
So what this means is i can't add the larger single drive into the mix without the first logical drive i create on it being assigned drive 1 (and thus rendering the machine unbootable).

Is there any way around this?? Is it possable to reassign the logical drive numbers without destroying the data on them??

Thanks for any help
--cb

 

[ntinlin]

Umm.
You might be able to get away with removing all the drives and then clearing the NVRAM.
Hopefully if you then put the RAID 5 set back in the controller will take this as the primary and you can add the single drive in afterwards.

Trying it shouldn't do any more harm.
Neill

 

[enigma174]

Hey thanks for the tip,

Should have checked back here, rather than following the compaq help desk's advice.
long storey short: i'm now restoring from backups and rebuilding.
Oh the fun of it all...

--cb

 

[enigma174]

But at least the drives are in the right order

 

[stritzgi]

Clearing the NVRAM won't do it, the array controller reads the config info from the disks themselves, thats how you can completely swap one set of drives for another and have different environments.

When you delete the array though, off the disk, well it will be gone for good along with the partition table ...