Xserve – adding drive to RAID

[rodney]

I have an G5 Xserve running 10.3.9 with hardware RAID and two 80Gb drives. I’m going to add a 3rd 500Gb drive in the spare bay. According to this thread it’s not possible to have a RAID set with one drive.

So I am wondering how I am going to mount this drive.

One suggestion in the thread is to disconnect the third drive bay from the RAID card putting that back into the original SATA on the motherboard. Has anyone actually done this – is this a safe approach?

Can anyone shed more light on this, or suggest alternative approach.

Thanks for your comments.

Rodney

[rodney]

I’ve inserted the 3rd drive.

Interesting side note – the Xserve started beeping continuously which is caused by megaraid, you can stop it from the command line.

Tried creating a one member RAID1 set by issuing command:

megaraid -create R1 -drive 2 -stripesize 64

MEGARAID CLI version 1.0.12

Insufficient Drives 1 for RAID1
INITIALIZATION started on LD 2
Configuration Creation Complete Successfully

oceanserve:~ root# megaraid -showconfig
MEGARAID CLI version 1.0.12
Logical Drive Found = 3
Logical Drive RAID Level StripeSize(KB) Size(MB) Status
————- ———- ————– ——– ——
0 1 64 8000 OPTIMAL
1 1 64 70479 OPTIMAL
2 1 64 476885 OPTIMAL

Logged in via VNC. Disk Tools shows a new disk, but, it thinks it is a 2Tb disk.

Next I did something which perhaps wasn’t so smart…

oceanserve:~ root# megaraid -chkcon 2 -start

MEGARAID CLI version 1.0.12
Check Consistency started on LD 2
oceanserve:~ root# megaraid -chkcon 2 -status

MEGARAID CLI version 1.0.12

After about 10 minutes it returned me to command prompt.

oceanserve:~ root# megaraid -showconfig

MEGARAID CLI version 1.0.12
No MegaRAID Adapter Available
oceanserve:~ root# megaraid -showconfig

MEGARAID CLI version 1.0.12
No MegaRAID Adapter Available

Hmmmm! No other option but to perform a hard shutdown, remove the new drive and restart… came back up OK.

I’m leaning towards just plugging it into the SATA connectors at this point.

[rodney]

Disaster.

On rebooting the machine it goes to the login screen but will not log in with any username/password combination, e.g. as root, user etc.

During the rebooting the technician reports that the startup icon swaps between a document with a question mark and a happy face, then after doing this for a little bit, continues booting as per normal until it gets to the login screen.

Suggestions or comments on how to proceed from here would be greatly appreciated.

~ Rodney

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