exchanging physical sata disk from raid1 (mirror) setup
(system-/bootpartition and a single data partition on same disk) before
actually physically failing (pre-smart condition) - deliberately
removing physical disk
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hi there,
having (non r2) windows server 2003 standard edition sp2 . with two same
sized physical sata disks (seagate) connected to onboard sata controller.
two partitions on disk(s), drive c: and drive x:, c: is boot/system drive.
c: and x: are raid1 / mirror. everything works properly. booting
everything. also testing automatical rebuilding of out-of-sync situations.
so far so good.
one of the physical disks has a lot of smart error counters (reallocated
sector count increasing on daily/hourly basis).
whole system still syncs and still is fine.
i still want to remove/replace/rma/refurbish this physical drive with
the smart problems.
having read through a number of msft knowledgebase articles still gives
me some big question marks, there are some really old nt3.x and nt4 era
kb articles about raid1/mirroring stuff, there is a bit of win2003server
stuff and all kinds of typos and description lacking details for example
about the gui part of the partition manager configuration way and so on....
i also found the technet/library articles there, some describing a bit
and some more details about commandline diskpart tool and so on.
i need some recap of the exact steps: do i simply shutdown my still
normally working win2003server system.
remove the (pre-)faulty physical sata disk from its sata enclosure
(swappable), and reboot the win2003 system (works fine, booting from
both or either participating disks) and then do what exactly in the
partition manager there?
remove mirror? or this other function break mirror?
i am kinda confused about this situation. the old drive is not gonna
come back means in my opinion that there is no useful information coming
back from that drive.
also the replacement physical drive will be empty, so basically i end up
having no raid any more, means i need to re-create the mirror for both
c: and x:
so this leaves me that i could actually remove (?) the mirror
configuration with both drives still working, and then simply recreating
it with the new replacement physical drive?
or are there any missing steps i need to take?
what i am confused about is probably that i cant come up with a scenario
where a (physical) drive goes awry and then could be re-activated or
could come back at a later time. or am i wrong?
so why is this re-adding another empty physical disk "so complicated" in
the windows world? maybe its just in my head as i havent tested this
scenario and have little experience here.
in my opinion windows/gui could simply say that the mirror is only
consisting of the left-over drive any more, and then there is a new
empty physical disk again to be made use of, and if the first drive
should be mirrored again onto the fresh physical drive.
any hints of what to do? simply remove the physical disk? un-create the
mirror first with both disks in place and adding new physical disk again
after that?
any other hints?
thanks. regards.
bert.
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