Lost a drive in a mirrored array
 

This is my first time posting. I have a quick question.

I have a Proliant sever with Red Hat 5 on it.

It is set up with one array 0+1 8 mirrored disks.

One of the drives failed. It seemed the mirror was working fine.

I decided to bounce the server and run a check disk at boot to see if there was any other corruption.

Now it won't boot. Was it a mistake to bounce it?

If I replace the drive and the mirror is restored I am hoping it will boot up.

Is it false hope?


Thanks

Neil

It is usually not a good idea to physically jar mechanical drives unnecessarily - especially if they are running at the time. Not only can "bouncing" potentially damage a drive further, it can damage otherwise normal drives, knock cables loose, shake RAM in its slots, even crack motherboard traces due to stress from heavy components like CPU heatsinks and have other potential undesirable effects. The "... get a bigger hammer" approach generally doesn't work well with electronics and precision mechanical parts.

Open the case and check all physical connections, cables, ensure RAM is properly seated, heatsinks are still in place. etc. Then try rebooting again.

Was this software RAID or hardware RAID?

I am not sure 100%. I am guessing it is a software raid controller. It is just the internal bays on a ProLiant DL385 G6. I didn't set this one up. And I am very inexperienced when it comes to the actual hardware configuration.

You can look for any SATA controller installed in a slot.
You can see if the on board SATA ports are disabled in the BIOS setup. They are often disabled if a RAID controller is installed.
You can look at the text on the screen during POST. A hardware RAID controller is initialised early.

Normally, a HP hardware controller tests well the drives, so you have only to generate a report from the Array management tools.


/EDIT

I see that this server comes with the HP Smart Array 410 controller, by default. This is a true RAID controller, so I wouldn't think is it a software RAID array configured in the server.