Recreating a Raid 1 Array with an unformatted disk

[Shadizzy]

Alright guys, you've been an excellent source of information in the past and I appreciate all you guys do first off 😀.


Now I have a TYAN S5360-1U Thunder i7520//R Motherboard and 2 WD Raptor 150 gig drives Running on Windows Server 2003 Standard.

Now everything was working fine and one day the entire server goes down, upon rebooting it would tell me that one of the raid logical drives are dead and the raid bios is not found and one of the hard drives was physically completely dead. This is the integrated Raid that is on the Tyan motherboard and not some separate card.

While rma'ing the broken hd to WD, through the actual mobo BIOS (not the raid config bios) i turned off the RAID option and it booted off the single HD which would boot into the windows splash screen let the bar move a little then reboot over and over.

I then inserted the Windows 2003 cd and did a repair on the installation, and it came back up. All the data is intact and the server is running right now with 1 drive.

Now! I received the new drive and my question is, how can I recreate this mirrored raid without compromising the data on the original drive that is still running?

Basically one drive has all the information, the other is brand new from WD (well re certified) what's the safest way to get them back to Mirrored status without reformatting both drives and leaving all the data intact and simply copying it over to the new drive.


This is my first time doing this so I am really worried and losing this data simply cannot happen, it's actual applications that are installed and not just data that can be copied so registry entries and so on need to be intact.


Thanks for your help!

 

[OdiN]

Why did you turn off the RAID?

The problem may be that by enabling RAID you might need a different driver and the system might not boot if you do so.

The system should have been able to continue booting even with one failed drive, so something is wrong there.

 

[Shadizzy]

exactly ! with the bad drive out booting it with raid on wouldnt work! that's what really bothered me, it said bios not configed or something like that and then operating system not found.

 

[Denithor]

Well, for starters, if you have critical data on that single remaining drive, for goodness sake (and your mental health) back it up before you do anything else. Use WD toolkit or some 3rd party software (Norton Ghost, etc) to image that HDD onto another drive (or just back up the data itself onto DVD). I would personally image onto another machine so if anything screws up while setting back up the raid array you just copy it back with all configuration data etc intact.

What you may be able to do is set back up the raid array with the two drives blank and then copy back on the image (or set back up Windows and then copy back the data from DVD if you go that route).

 

[Shadizzy]

What would you recommend to use for imaging a disk, hopefully a free solution, that will have network drivers installed so I can toss them on a different server for storage.

 

[imported_Baloo]

Just make sure when you recreate the array that you mirror your existing drive to the new drive, not the other way about - and BACK UP YOUR DATA!

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Back up your data, and then backup that data. Recreating an array from existing data is risky stuff no matter what controller you are running. My recommendation (and I speak for myself only, so take it as you will) it image the array, backup the data, destroy the array, create the disks from scratch and re-establish the data. Much safer and less risks involved.

 

[Shadizzy]

Thanks for your help guys, real quick do you have any ideas for free imagining software that will allow me to copy this drive and then restore it on the newly recreated blank drives.

I am guessing something like ghost :X