Primary hard drive failure (RAID)

[BlipBlip]

Hi All,

I have a customer with a BCM400 4.0 running RAID and the primary HDD has failed. Am I correct in a thinking when I remove the failed primary HDD I will need to then disconnect the mirrored HDD and reconnect it to the primary IDU and then install the new blank HDD on the mirrored IDU.

Advanced thanks on any replies.

 

[cook1082]

You are correct!

 

[curlycord]

I was thinking not, and that the raid controller is pointing to hard drives and not a particular IDE port.
Simply swap the one that is down and one will re-write the other.





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curlycord

http://www.curlycord.com

 

[curlycord]

Check out page 258
BCM200/400 4.0 Installation and
Maintenance Guide



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curlycord

http://www.curlycord.com

 

[telcodog]

The problem with doing that is you don't know if the drive has failed due to a hardware problem or that some of the software is corrupted. The RAID in these systems are RAID 1 which is the simplest of RAID arrays and all it does is a bit for bit copy so if the software on the Primary is corrupted, there is a very good chance that it will copy the corruption to the Mirrored drive.

So, if you do what you are suggesting, you just might corrupt the software on the new drive. Before you take that path, you might want to pop that mirrored drive into a test system and make sure the system will boot from it first. Otherwise, put in a new drive and go through the proper procedure to initialize it and before you put in that mirrored drive, test the RAID hardware. I've had several that caused the problem in the first place.