One of my clients’ Dell PowerEdge Servers is getting towards the end of its 5 year warranty and was starting to generate disk errors on Drive 0, a hot swap SCSI hard drive.
The drive was part of a Windows 2000 Server software RAID 1 (mirror) set and it needed to be replaced.
Here is the procedure I used that did not cost any downtime of the server.
- Make sure all backups and disaster recovery plan are up to date.
- Remove the failing hard drive (Windows Server now shows it as “missing” with failed redundancy on the remaining drive.
- In Disk Management, right click each partition on the remaining Drive 1 of the mirror set and select “remove mirror”. A popup window asks which disk to remove from the set, I selected the “Drive 0 (missing)” option. Windows displayed the “missing” status making this easy to get correct.
- Once all mirrors were removed (3 partitions), I was able to right click the missing disk itself and select “remove disk”.
- Inserted new disk as Drive 0, waited a moment and refreshed the screen to show it.
- Right clicked the new drive and selected “write signature”.
- Right clicked the new drive and selected “upgrade to dynamic disk”. (I’m not sure if it really is an upgrade, but it’s the only way to software mirror.)
- Right clicked each partition that I wanted to mirror on Drive 1 and selected “add mirror” and then selected (the only choice) Drive 0 as the drive to use for the mirroring operation.
After that, the drives synchronized and the mirror became functional.
Step 9: breathe….
