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SteveMpcrs

5 Posts

21429

February 24th, 2007 19:00

Upgrade RAID-5 SATA array

Current configuratioin is Poweredge SC1420 running Windows 2003 Server with Serial ATA CONTROLLER CERC-SATA-6CH and three 40GB, 7.2K, WD-XL80SD-2 hard drives in RAID-5 Array.  There is not enough space to mount additonal drives, so I'd like to replace the 40's with 250's and clone the existing array.  Existing array is partitioned into 3 partitions.
 
Can I hook three new 250 gb SATA drives in temporarily, configure them as a second RAID-5 set?  (How?)
 
What software can I use to clone the existing array to the new array?  (Ghost doesn't work on servers)
 
At what point and how do I expand the size of the logical D: and E: drives to use the full new space on the larger array?
 
Then can I simply reconfigure with only the larger RAID-5 set and simply boot and run with room to grow?

DELL-GaryS

777 Posts

February 28th, 2007 20:00

Hi Steve,
  Try this... add a single one of your 250 GB drives
 (Up to four non-hot-plug, 1-inch, internal SATA hard drives with the SATA RAID controller card)
Configure this drive as a RAID 0, use the OS S/W mirroring to mirror to this drive... after you break the mirror, you can remove ALL drives, clear the configuration and put just this drive back in and pull in it's configuration, (this is to make it LD0 so the boot.ini file will be right) you then add in the other two 250 GB drives and select to reconfigure the array into a RAID 5... once the reconfiguration is done... you're finished.
 
  The old set is your backout plan, they can be reinstalled and the configuration pulled back in.
 
Dell-GaryS
 

SteveMpcrs

5 Posts

March 4th, 2007 15:00

Thank you. It hadn't occurred to me to mirror a RAID-5 set.
 
Adding the second and third 250gb drive and reconfiguring as RAID-5, I assume, is done through the controller firmware/functionality. Is this correct?
 
Is there also the capability to resize all three partitions in the controller or will I need to purchase a third party server repartitioning program such as acronis, paragon, or eprofessor?
 
Can you also point me to a manual online for the controller?

DELL-GaryS

777 Posts

March 5th, 2007 13:00

Hi Steve,
 
Yes you do the reconfiguration inside the controller BIOS.
 
No, the controller does not deal with your partitioning, you'll need to set that up using the O/S's utilities or a 3rd party utility.
 
 
Dell-GaryS

SteveMpcrs

5 Posts

March 24th, 2007 19:00

I now have a 465gb RAID-5 array as LD0 which will not boot except from a floppy boot disk.  What essential step have I missed and how do I rectify it?
 
RAID-5 array shows Optimal.  Floppy boot.ini is set multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS and works OK.  I've copied the same boot.ini to c:\ as well. Booting from hard drive just stops cold ... no NTLDR missing message or anything.
 
At one point during the process of building the RAID-5 array, I noted a message that said, "Logical disk manager could not update the boot file for any boot partitions on the target disk. Verify your arcpath listing in the boot.ini or through bootcfg.exe utility"  I did use recovery console to attempt Fixboot and Bootcfg, but still no boot from the RAID array directly ... so the user is running OK with a floppy in the a: drive ... but this is not a good long term solution.

DELL-GaryS

777 Posts

April 17th, 2007 14:00

The mirror lacks a partition for the dell utility partition, so the boot.ini is looking one partition too high.
 
At least that's my theory.
 
Regards,
Dell-GaryS

Dev Mgr

4 Operator

 • 

9.3K Posts

April 18th, 2007 12:00


@Anonymous-GaryS wrote:
The mirror lacks a partition for the dell utility partition, so the boot.ini is looking one partition too high.
At least that's my theory.
Regards,
Dell-GaryS




And to fix this, boot to the Windows CD and select to boot to the recovery console (it's under the repair option). In there do a 'fixboot' and reboot again to see if that helps. Some info on the recovery console can be found here.

If that doesn't work, an alternative would be to make a boot.ini and put it on a floppy disk. Then boot to the recovery console, rename the existing boot.ini (cannot delete it in the recovery console), and copy the file from the floppy in it's place.

Another option, which may be a bit more involving is to try a repair from the Windows install CD (with or without the emergency repair disk).

Yet another option would be to use a disk management utility that you can run from a CD or so to moke just a little bit of space 'in front of' the Windows partition and create another 'dead' partition there, which would make the boot.ini point to the Windows partition.

dp-it

8 Posts

June 26th, 2007 11:00

Hi,
 
I'm facing a similair problem where I have to replace the exisiting drives (in raid 0) with bigger drivers and put them in raid 5. After that I need to restore my OS and I was thinking to use a Symantec Ghost image for it. However, sata drives and raid are do not always work with ghost.
 
You said this in your first reply:
 
>Try this... add a single one of your 250 GB drives
>Configure this drive as a RAID 0, use the OS S/W mirroring to mirror to this drive
 
Does this mean you can mirror the entire OS from within Windows 2003? I've never heard of that option... Where/how/what do I need to do to start this mirroring?
 
 
Thanks,
 
Richard
 

DELL-GaryS

777 Posts

June 26th, 2007 13:00

Hi dp-it,
 
  In the disk management portion of the O/S you should see a listing of all your logical drives. if you have a unpartitioned LD that is as large or larger than your drive that contains the O/S, you should be able to select the O/S drive and select to mirror it. NOTE, this process will take a good bit of time to copy the files.
 
  Of course the actual terminology and process may vary depending on the O/S you have and even what management S/W you have installed for your RAID controller (if any).
 
Regards,
Dell-GaryS

SteveMpcrs

5 Posts

June 27th, 2007 02:00

The solution almost worked flawlessly.
 
I could only add one drive to the existing controller, so I added a 250 gb SATA drive, formatted it and mirrored the existing drives to it (mine were RAID 5, but RAID 0 should work too).
 
Mistake #1: Original drives had a 64mb EISA partition. I didn't reserve/build it on the target drive.
 
After mirror was complete, removed the original drives, altered the boot.ini to reflect booting from the first partition instead of the second (due to missing EISA partition). System would not boot from hard drive, did boot fine and run well from floppy.
 
Next move, new 250 gb drive as primary, add a new RAID 5 array, mirror the 250gb drive to the RAID array.  Time consuming, but slick.
 
With the boot floppy, was able to boot from the new RAID array fine, but could not boot direct from hard drive.
 
With a bit of help from Microsoft, used disk edit utility to edit the boot sector to repoint the first used sector and also to fiddle the number of track (as I recall). After this we were able to boot from hard drive.
 
I really couldn't say if reserving a partition the same size as the original EISA partition would have saved the disk edit ... but ... the drives were successfully cloned onto much larger RAID 5 array.
 
Hope this helps.

DELL-GaryS

777 Posts

June 27th, 2007 15:00

When I had customers do this and we did reserve the partition, we were able to boot to the drive without any problems. Sorry I forgot to advise that step.
 
Regards,
Dell-garyS

dp-it

8 Posts

June 28th, 2007 12:00

 
How did you mirror the existing drives to the new one?

I only need to mirror my C: drive so I won't have to reinstall Windows 2003 and all the software which is installed.
I added a 6th disc to which I can clone this C: partition.
 
I have the Dell OpenManage Arraymanager installed but I can't find an option to do this.
The default Windows diskmanagement doesn't seem to support this either.
And in the cerc bios (ctrl-a at boot) I did not find an option either.
 
You started this post talking about a Norton Ghost image. That was my idea as well as it works very nice. The only problem is the support of sata and raid so if there is another way to clone my C: drive I would love to hear it...
 
 
Thanks,
 
Richard
 

SteveMpcrs

5 Posts

June 28th, 2007 21:00

Freshly added drives are usually "basic" drives.  Upgrade to "dynamic" and then the option to mirror becomes available.  See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323432
 

dp-it

8 Posts

July 2nd, 2007 12:00

Hi again,
 
I ended up doing it like you described because the Norton Ghost image did not work (I could make an image but I couldn't load it again due to a corrupted file...)
 
Only problem now is that I can only boot from floppy as well...
 
Here are the steps I performed:
 
1) Original situation is 5x 250gb in raid-0, drive id's 0-1-2-3-4
2) Add a 6th disk, 500gb, at drive position 5
3) Booted the server, made the new 500gb disk a dynamic disk and converted the existing drive (the raid-0) to a dynamic disc as well. Rebooted the server.
4) After reboot I first created a 39mb partition on the new disk (same size as the EISA partition). After that I selected the C: partition and chose to mirror it to the new disk. Shutdown after this proces was completed. Everything looked fine, the newly mirrored C: is the 2nd partition as well.
5) Removed all 250gb disks and only left the single 500gb disk.
6) Updated the raid config and tried to boot. This didn't work. I only saw a blinking cursor and nothing happened.
7) Rebooted again but now I booted from the boot floppy I created earlier. I used this article from Microsoft : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325879/en-us  so I only had to copy 3 files to floppy:
Ntldr, Ntdetect.com and boot.ini.  I copied all three files from the C: drive from the server.
With this boot floppy the system can boot normally.
I checked the boot.ini on the floppy and on the (mirrored) C: drive and they are identical (I copied this file so even the date & time are the same).
 
 
So what do I have to do to get this server booting without the floppy?
 
 
...I noticed that I can't extend the new C: partition...that's a shame because at only 12GB it's a bit small. I got a message that this isn't possible because it's a boot partition or it was a dynamic disk before. Any thought on this as well?
 
 
 
Thanks,
 
Richard


Message Edited by dp-it on 07-02-2007 08:21 AM

DELL-GaryS

777 Posts

July 2nd, 2007 19:00

 Hi,
 
 Ok I suspect you have the 500 GB drive as logical drive 1 instead of LD0, try editing the multi statement in your boot.ini from disk 0 to disk 1. Use DOS FDISK utility to make sure the C: partition is the active partition.
 
Regards,
Dell-GaryS

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