Topic: Cannot boot from raid 1 mirror

[eastend99]

Hello,

Today I had a disk failure on the main disk (sda) of my 7.3 server.
So I shutdown the server, remove the faulty drive and try to restart running from the mirror drive (hda).
The BIOS(?) says: Error loading operating system.
The disk can be mounted when I boot from he SME install CD with the rescue option and I can see all the files.
I think there is something wrong with the master boot record of my second drive. 

I am unsure what to do next and unable to find similar posts or wiki pages.

Please help,

Marcel

[janet]

eastend99

Read all the links referred to here:
http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Documentation:FAQ#Hard_Drives.2C_RAID.27s.2C_USB_Hard_Drives

especially
http://wiki.contribs.org/Raid

[christian]

In addition and I hate to ask this. But are you absolutely sure you pulled out the correct drive or that you have identified the correct drive that failed? If you are not sure then tell us how you identified the failed drive so we can at least make sure you are going down the right path.

[eastend99]

Sorry for posting in the Contribs forum, I think the SME7 or general discussion is a better option.
Thanks for your replies. 

Yes, I am sure I have pulled the right drive. I can imagine switching two SATA or two IDE drives, but my system has a SATA and IDE?
I removed the SATA drive. The failure showed up after a server reboot. The SATA drive spins, but is not recognized by the BIOS at all, I connected the disk to two other machines with the same result.

I solved the problem for now by replacing the faulty drive with a new one and a fresh SME 7.3 install. After that I restored  the latest backup. Never done that before. The DAR2 contrib worked flawlessly . 

What still bothers me is that I thought I had a copy (mirror), but it did not work as expected (shutdown - pull a disk and simply reboot). I have successfully switched disk devices before in another SME 7 server and that worked as expected.

I did not activate mirror yet. I still have the original (boot error) mirror disk.
Running the server without a mirror for a few days is acceptable and it gives me the opportunity to test things.
Hopefully I will be able to find the cause of the boot failure.

Marcel