replace mirrored drive dell 2400 poweredge

[karmic]

Hi all...

Have a server with a failed hard drive on a dell poweredge 2400 system with a perc controller. I'm not very familiar with the perc controller.

The system is set up with 2 hot swap 16 gig mirrored scsi drives. The mirror is still set but one of the "member drives" is missing. Anything special with the dells that I should know about? or just fdisk, format and reset the mirror as per usual?

Thanks in advance.

~ K.I.S.S - Don't make it any more complex than it has to be ~

 

[karmic]

ok, job done...

for anyone that has to do it, set the id's for the dead drive the same for the new drive. install the drive and pop into the scsi config <ctrl-a>. when you select the container, the perc controller will start the mirror process automatically.

~ K.I.S.S - Don't make it any more complex than it has to be ~

 

[Maritime]

Hi Karmic,
I have a similar issue, in terms of wanting to change out one of my mirrored drives. The problem is I have a Exchange database that's outgrowing my disk. I'm wondering how easy, or is it at all possible to break a mirror and add a bigger drive. I'm not sure if this can work.

 

[karmic]

Don't think that will work the way you want it to...

There's two good possibilities here:

You can ghost an image of your server to a larger drive and recreate a mirror using both the larger drives (just make sure you have a good backup before you try this). I've never tried this with an exchange server before tho, don't know how it will react. But you'll still have your original drives to fall back on if it doesn't work right?

-or-

Buy 2 additional larger drives and create a mirror in addition to the existing ones. Move whatever you need to over to the new drives to make room.

Is your exchange on a PDC or a member server? What OS are you running?

~ K.I.S.S - Don't make it any more complex than it has to be ~

 

[Maritime]

Exchange is on the PDC. And I'm running Windows NT and Exchange 5.5. I was also considering moving from Raid 1 to RAID 5. I spoke to Dell and they are saying that this should not be a problem. Just install the new drive, break the mirror and recofigure the drives for RAID 5. What do you think? I posted here about doing this same thing for my SQL server, but the responses were'nt encouraging. Too mush stress . But I seem to have no choice on the Exchange Server.

 

[karmic]

According to dell everything is that simple and their hardware can work miracles. I'm just a little more skittish.

I don't think it's that simple... Raid 5 requires 3 equal size hard drives. If you're currently running an 8 gig, you can't just mirror to a 70 gig. Same holds with raid 5.

If you want to move to raid 5, you really should buy 3 drives of the same size. Not a cheap solution but much better overall.

Ghosting an image should work for you. Create the raid 5 and drop an image onto the logical drive. Done it with NT server but unfortunately, exchange wasn't part of the equation. It really shouldn't be a problem. Just make sure, again, to do a backup and keep one of your old drives handy.

~ K.I.S.S - Don't make it any more complex than it has to be ~