swapping drives

[mbarlam]

On a Dell PowerEdge 4400 with a PERC 3 card, can I take the RAID 5'd drives out, shelf them, put new ones in, then put the shelf'd drives in another 4400 and have it recognize the RAID config, thus boot up??

 

[johnv20]

yes - just press cntrl M at boot and use this to restore the raid - use the nvram config and this should bring the original raid back up. You will also need to initalize the drives in order to start putting s/w on them - there is an option in cntrl m to do this also.

 

[mbarlam]

But will the data on the shelf'd drives be lost? I want to be able to restore the shelf'd drives as if the server was never down. Is the config saved on the drives,RAID card or system BIOS?

 

[MJewell]

the config info is saved on the nvram on the controller, I would suggest you write down all the settings... You might be able to do it... I would make a full back up the current set of drives before playing with the raid configs...

Mike

 

[BoredK]

Assuming you mean a PERC 3/Di this is not a problem. The configuration is saved to the disks which will be read when attached to another controller, and can be saved in the PERC BIOS. Which can be entered by pressing Ctrl-A.