Broke RAID 1, now no boot

T

Team Obi Juan

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WTF did I just do??? Nothing irreplaceable is lost so this is just a learning experience.


Short story:

Guys from computer support set up 2 x 500gb drives in RAID 1, didn't partition it and set up Windows 2k Server.

I need it partitioned, for all obvious reasons. 500gb drive is just stupid.

Tooled around with GParted, didn't read enough, and found that it doesn't recognize RAID arrays, just the individual drives.

Next I broke the array up, leaving 2 identical bootable hard drives. But now when I boot it, it says load boot device. Even if I rebuild the array it doesn't boot from it either. Yes, I have the BIOS looking to the hard drives to boot.

Any ideas? I can get the W2k CD from them on Wednesday so I'll be fine. I plan on just redoing the RAID and using Windows set up to partition it how I want, but if I can still salvage this and just partition it up without having to reinstall, that'd be great too.

Thanks! :)
 
There probably isnt a way to recover your array. Its not meant so that you can take one drive out and take it over to another computer and poof, your stuff is magically back. Sheesh. lurk moar.
 
xenotype said:
There probably isnt a way to recover your array. Its not meant so that you can take one drive out and take it over to another computer and poof, your stuff is magically back. Sheesh. lurk moar.
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Hypothetical situation:

being a good nerd, you set up a RAID 1 on your computer and do the backups to some offsite, off planet underground location whatever.

God kills one of your drives in your RAID. You know that your backup is safe, but what of that second drive in your RAID? What was its purpose this whole time you were computing? What do you do with it?
 
shade_star said:
A lot of the time when you break an array the single drives wont boot.
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That is true for all RAID arrays, except RAID1. I break up RAID1 arrays all the time and also create RAID1 arrays from a single drive, all without data loss. In fact in the past month I converted a old SCSI server from RAID1 into 2 single drives and converted my Main machine from RAID1 to single drives when one of the Drives failed last week. I think the OP screwed up the partition tables when he used GParted.

If I was the OP I would put the drive in another computer and see if the partitions are still there. If they are then he just needs to rebuild his boot sector and MBR.

xenotype said:
There probably isnt a way to recover your array. Its not meant so that you can take one drive out and take it over to another computer and poof, your stuff is magically back. Sheesh. lurk moar.
Click to expand...

You need to lurk more. The point of RAID1 is hard drive redundancy. It is supposed to make it so when one of the drives fails the computer will continue to work.
 
brom42 said:
That is true for all RAID arrays, except RAID1. I break up RAID1 arrays all the time and also create RAID1 arrays from a single drive, all without data loss. In fact in the past month I converted a old SCSI server from RAID1 into 2 single drives and converted my Main machine from RAID1 to single drives when one of the Drives failed last week. I think the OP screwed up the partition tables when he used GParted.

If I was the OP I would put the drive in another computer and see if the partitions are still there. If they are then he just needs to rebuild his boot sector and MBR.



You need to lurk more. The point of RAID1 is hard drive redundancy. It is supposed to make it so when one of the drives fails the computer will continue to work.
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I didn't do anything with GParted actually. I booted it and immediately realized I was in over my head. I hit enter on the auto configuration and got to a list of my 2 drives. Then it wanted to know what I wanted to do with it. I just exited because I was about to do harm.

That was when I went into the RAID settings and broke it up. It didn't wipe the drives or anything, just rebooted, set boot priorities, and tried to boot.
 
you need to go into your raid controler and disable the raid.. more than likely the controler is still reporting it as a raid with undefined type

ps i gave up on partitioning big drives into a buncha smaller partitions long ago.. (except when dual booting) but since there is no reason for dual booting anymore big drive HO
 
darkar said:
you need to go into your raid controler and disable the raid.. more than likely the controler is still reporting it as a raid with undefined type

ps i gave up on partitioning big drives into a buncha smaller partitions long ago.. (except when dual booting) but since there is no reason for dual booting anymore big drive HO
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This will be a database server. I only really want 2 partitions, 1 80 gig for all apps and Windows, and then the rest to store the databases themselves.
 
mdameron said:
This will be a database server. I only really want 2 partitions, 1 80 gig for all apps and Windows, and then the rest to store the databases themselves.
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An easier option would be to buy 2 small drives for a RAID1 for the OS and then have the 2 500's be a RAID1 for the database. Then if your OS gets hosed you won't lose the database. RAID will only protect you from hardware failure - not data loss - somebody can still erase something and that erasure will just get mirrored to the second drive.

Also, all of the bige database vendors, like Oracle, recommend a RAID0+1 or RAID10. This requires 4 drives minimum.

It really depends on how much your data is worth. Medical records would be worth more than a database of baseball trading cards.

Just my $0.02
 
Do you have a backup???

If so you could restore that to just a single drive.
 
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