SATA Raid Mirror Repair Brainfreeze

[OutToLunch]

Afternoon,

 

One of the 2 drives in a mirror set on one of my fileservers has had it, it appears... The drives are set up as mirrored raid using the onboard Intel SATA raid tool - I have to confess, I've never tried to fix a raid array before, but I'd assumed that if one drive in a mirror died, all I had to do was throw another suitable drive in, poke something and off it would go. Seems that's not the case?

 

All I have as options in the raid control are Create/Delete raid set, both of which warn me about losing all raid data... Doesn't seem very helpful! Could anyone give me a pointer as to whether I really have to wipe everything and restore from tape just to get the mirror back up?

 

The motherboard is an Intel D865Perl with Intel® 82801ER

SATA RAID Controller (apparently!).

 

Help give my brain a post holiday kickstart?

 

Cheers,

 

Ben

[Geoff]

go in your raid tools (either on bootup or in the OS).

 

1. Set the broken drive as 'offline'

2. Replace the drive.

3. Put the new drive back 'online'

4. Run a repair (unless your raid controller does it automagically).

[OutToLunch]

Doh. Hands up if you didn't install the Intel storage matrix software in Windows thinking it was all done in the bios :$ Now all I have to do is swear at the fact it refuses to rebuild as an unformated 120gb WD drive has less capacity than a 120gb Maxtor!!!

[Geoff]

The drives need to be identical.

[OutToLunch]

I thought a 120GB drive was a 120GB drive Argh. Anyone got a spare Maxtor 120GB they'd like to swap for a WD one?

[spc-rocket]

The drives need to be identical.

 

Thats usually the good practice but not strictly true, the drive needs to be larger or equal to the other drive. Some drives althrough they may say 120Gb it may be slightly less than that or more than the exact 120Gb. Even few bytes will cause it not to pick up or use it to rebuilt.

 

So take a note of the good drive size (in bytes) and then compare the size of the replacement drive and see if these match. If you new drive size is greater than your good drive then that's should be fine but if less you're out of luck and will need another drive that is equal or bigger.

 

HTH,

 

Ashok.