Replacing dead on-board scsi ontroller with scsi card

Hi all

Had the drive controller die on a server the othr day. Just got my hands on the replacement, an Adptec 29320A SCSI card. Installed the card, board picks it up no problems just wondering what to do about the drives as this is the first time I've ever ad this problem.

The drives were mirrored on the original drive controller and I would like them to be mirrored on the new drive controller without losing any data.

How do I do this? The SCSI-Select utility picks up both drives but the original mirrored status seems to be lost, I'm assuming that was stored by the on board controller. How do I re-mirror the drives without losing any data?

Like I said this is a first for me and I am more than a little concerned about the potential to lose data.

**UPDATE**
I decided discretion was the better part of valour and chose to exit the RAID utility and let the thing boot up. Got a Windows Server 2003 logo just long enough to give me hope before it blue screened on me with a STOP 7B error message.

What now?

 

You might want to repost this over on the http://forums.anandtech.com in the Peripherals section. There is a fellow over there who is very sharp on SCSI.
. The main thing about retaining RAID sets is to use a replacement host adapter (which some mistakenly call a controller) which uses as close to the same SCSI chip as was integrated on your mobo as possible.
. One should also keep in mind that mirroring (or RAID 1) is not an adequate backup methodology - it is strictly for achieving maximum uptime if ONE drive goes bad - if the host adapter goes bad it could take both drives along with it. A real backup plan is just as necessary with RAID 1 as for any single drive (I use an external hard drive myself). Let's hope you aren't yet another to have learned that the hard way - there is a program out there called R-Studio which should allow you to recover the data from at least one of your drives (once again hoping that both drives weren't fragged when the integrated host adapter went TU)... I pretty much stopped using SCSI when I switched to SATA drives and I never used the RAID features. Good luck.

.bh.

 

Thanks for your reply.

Retaining the RAID is not as big a priority as it was as Adaptec tell me that this controller can rebuild the RAID if required. Right now its getting the Adaptec card to boot drives that were orginially running off an LSI chip.

Installaing a drive onto a disk that you cant boot from is proving troublesome.

 

Unless you have a hardware problem in one of the drives (Adaptec's rom based Verify would answer that), the problem will be translation. Some SCSI controllers use 32 sectors per track, some use 63, and the same is true for the number of heads.
Checking for this problem can be a bear, too! I would suggest getting a copy of Hirens Boot CD (you will need a Bittorrent client and then Google it). Norton's Diskedit is included and run it. Choose physical drive, sector zero, and view it as Partition table. That will give you the organization of the existing drive. Then choose Tools, Advanced Recovery Mode, and it will tell you what the Adaptec is translating the drive as. I'll bet they are different.
Adaptec's rom has an option for "drives over 1GB" which alters that translation. Changing its value MAY solve the problem; but, be sure to recheck with Norton before attempting to boot.

 

I got a copy of Hirens w/o using Bittorrent. But before you DL Hirens, be aware that it contains "unauthorized installations of various commercial softwares". So you won't find the ISO at the ethical download sites. I think I got mine via http://www.9down.com

.bh.

 

If the sector size was a problem would it still get me as far as a Server 2003 splash screen? Surely if it cant read sectors of different sizes then it cant read any of them, not just the ones after the splash screen.