Has anyone ever experienced this before? I have two SAS RAID controller cards in a Dell server in slots 2 & 3, both with an array hanging off them. I went to install a third card into slot 1, but then when it boots it says two of my sd's have bad magic number in the super-block and it wants me to create an alternative one, which I don't want to do. If i remove the new card, the server boots perfectly like it did before I added the new card. Is the new card trying to control stuff that isn't hooked up to it because its in slot 1, so its confusing RHEL?

its complains the bad magic number is on two of the volumes that are on the existing controller cards in slots 2 and 3. Looks like i wasn't clear earlier.

I guess I'm not understanding how RHEL handles drives. I know if you add a new array into a Windows server, it'll just show it as a new unused volume. is Linux not as friendly?

When you install the new card do you use the raid bios software to check that the arrays are correct? It might be that the new card is taking the old disks as it's array somehow. Might be a pci order issue. Move cards around.

Whatever you do don't change, just look. Better still make a backup before you try this.

It looked like all the arrays were in order when looking at it all in the raid bios. The new card definitely showed only the new drives in the new RAID5 setup i had just created.

Can you move cards to different pci slots without losing the config and data?

Yeah, i'm definitely afraid of changing. 15TB of data would be a lot to lose because I did something stupid!

the problem was that the person who loaded the server didn't e2label the existing volumes. once i did that, i could add the other card and array fine.