Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
4 Posts
0
108759
January 29th, 2016 00:00
Can RAID 1 Boot from both HDDs?
I have a Dell Poweredge T430 with a H330 PERC RAID Controller which I setup with RAID and in openmanage says it was all ok.
I just wanted to double check before setting everything up it was working ok so decided to unplug 1 drive at a time and check they could both boot up in the event one fails but only one boots up?
Can anyone explain why this is and if the one which boots fails how do I get my system back on as the other HDD doesn't boot? Not done too many RAID setups before so a bit new to me.
No Events found!
DELL-Chris H
7 Practitioner
•
9.7K Posts
•
48K Points
0
January 29th, 2016 07:00
Jase888,
With a Raid 1 the drives are mirrored, so in essence you always are booting off of both. Now when you remove a drive the remaining drive will operate normally. To test that remaining drive you must first Rebuild the removed drive back into the Virtual Disk. Once the rebuild completes then you can remove the untested drive and the originally removed drive should maintain the Virtual disk as well. Is this what you were doing, or did you simply remove the drive and then place it back and immediately remove the other drive? If so that will fail the Virtual disk and keep it from booting.
Let me know what you are seeing.
theflash1932
11 Legend
•
16.3K Posts
0
January 29th, 2016 08:00
OR ...
When you removed disk 1 to test, disk 0 should boot fine. If you then remove disk 0 and insert disk 1, it will NOT boot. This is because the controller recognizes the disk is from that mirror but has an outdated configuration, so you must IMPORT that configuration before it can/will use it.
jase888
4 Posts
0
January 31st, 2016 23:00
Thanks Chris, yeah I removed each hard drive separately expecting both to automatically boot up. So if the drive that currently boots up was to fail tomorrow lets say how would I get the other drive to boot up? As you mention I need to use the drive that boots to rebuild to Virtual Disk?
Thanks again
theflash1932
11 Legend
•
16.3K Posts
1
February 1st, 2016 06:00
See my previous post. If you pull one drive while the OS is running, it should stay running on the remaining disk. If you put the disk back in that your removed, expecting it to boot, it WON'T. It's configuration is out of date and it will NOT boot until you import its configuration. You need to understand that the point of a RAID 1 is to protect against a single drive failure, so to test, pull a drive during operation. Period. It is not designed to do anything other than that.
Nielx168
7 Posts
0
February 10th, 2016 03:00
Hi!
May I ask, in a RAID 1, how does your hot spare works?
jase888
4 Posts
0
February 10th, 2016 06:00
Ah ok that makes more sense now. Thanks!