Raid Array

[Howard Graham]

How does the raid array work. I have a mirrored raid on a KD7 board. If I remove one of the drives in the raid and install it as the single C drive in a new system, will it boot?

Howard Graham

 

[TomG]

in theory, it should. the drive is supposed to be an exact mirror of the "master" drive in the mirror set and as such, it should have the same MBR and boot sector and all on it. I say "in theory" because I have not tested that first hand.

 

[Howard Graham]

I tried to put a single drive from a working mirrored array in and it would not boot in a new system. I'm puzzled why?

Howard

"TomG" wrote:

in theory, it should. the drive is supposed to be an exact mirror of the "master" drive in the mirror set and as such, it should have the same MBR and boot sector and all on it. I say "in theory" because I have not tested that first hand.

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If

I
remove one of the drives in the raid and install it as the single C drive in
a new system, will it boot?

Howard Graham

 

[TomG]

like I said, I have not tested that so I cannot say for sure. my guess would be that only the "master" drive of the set has the full boot (MBR and boot sector) information available to it. to complete the test, you might have wanted to try the main drive as well as the mirror drive and see what the results were.

 

[Richard Hopkins]

"Howard Graham" wrote:

I tried to put a single drive from a working mirrored array in and it would not boot in a new system. I'm puzzled why?

It's nothing to do with the fact that the disc concerned was part of a RAID array, if that's what you're thinking, although the fact that it was running on a RAID capable controller is probably part of the problem.

If the disc concerned is installed with Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP, system B would need to have a near exact hardware match to system A before you could expect a simple "swap & boot" to work. The hardware abstraction layer on these OSes simply won't load unless appropriate for the system concerned.

Also, if the disc concerned was running on, for example, a Highpoint controller in system A, but an SI, Intel or AMD controller in system B, you'd probably need to change settings in the system.ini file before being able to boot on B.