Want to add Raid, Advice NEEDED please

[Daniel Woodhouse]

Hey there

I have a customer who has a windows 2000 server running with 1 SCSI drive.
They want to add a RAID array.
I am quite sure that if I add the raid controller and move the SCSI drive to
it then it probably wont boot and come up with Inaccessable boot device.

Has anyone done this before or know of any documentation on the subject.
Installing Windows 2000 on a raid array is a piece of cake but I am not too
sure about adding an existing install onto a Raid Array.

Also. Can anyone recommend a Raid controller for a Intel SDS2 Server
motherboard.

Thanks in advance.

Daniel.

 

[Tobias Witte]

Hi!

I have a customer who has a windows 2000 server running with 1 SCSI drive.

you need at lease two drives to set up a raid-array. also you should be sure
about what rail level you want to use (e.g. RAID 0, RAID 1, etc.).

it then it probably wont boot and come up with Inaccessable boot device.

when you have successfully set up your raid, the controller manages
everything for you. what you see is only one drive and it acts as only one
drive. i believe, you will have to reinstall windows...

Has anyone done this before

yes. me. my controller has his own config-menu. here i could bind my two
harddisks to one raid-array. after that i just booted from cd-drive and
pressed "F6" ("want to install a third party raid-driver?"). with the
raid-driver-disk the setup installs everything itself.

Also. Can anyone recommend a Raid controller for a Intel SDS2 Server
motherboard.

"Silicon Image ATA 133 IDE-RAID Controller" -> that's my choice. but you
need something with SCSI-support...


tobias

 

[P. Meiners]

Have about 20 raid5 array server at various clients. All but a few have
LSIlogic raid adapter with Seagate drives. I have not replaced one drive
this year; this is not going to happen with IDE based arrays, nor are
you going to get the performance of scsi, especially the new u320
adapters.
From the very limited reviews, the Adaptec u320 2200s is faster than
the Lsilogic 320-2.
Just setup a couple of servers with LSIlogic u320 raid adapters with 15k
Seagate drives, they crush U160 arrays (with 15k drives).

 

[Oli Restorick]

This method is the least-likely to result in a crapped-out installation.

If you keep the original disk off the new controller until you have cloned
the installation to the other disk and successfully booted and tested the
installation, then you will have the original installation intact (except
for the addition of a new SCSI driver, which shouldn't cause a problem).

Once you're happy, you can wipe the original drive and mirror it to get a
RAID1 installation.

I would stronly recommend that your customer keeps a spare drive on the
shelf. If you can do this, then you can get the whole RAID1 system up and
running without harming the original installation.

It's probably worth cloning the installation to an IDE disk before you
start, in addition to ensuring that regular backups are being taken and can
be restored from.

Oli

 

[Roedy Green]

You'll need to do an "in-place upgrade". Check the Microsoft Knowledgebase
for complete instructions as to how to do so.

better do a Ghost backup first though. See
http://mindprod.com/bgloss/backup.html