Wonky RAID1 on Precision T3400..wish to break down and clone to single SSD

[YeOldeStonecat]

This one is outside my usual comfort zone. Took on a client who had their prior tech sell them a Precision T3400 workstation for their server hardware. 2 years ago. Yeah..the Precision is like 8 years old or more. But enough of that pizza tech. Server 2008 R2 on it, running a domain. 2...yup..2 gigs of RAM...C2D..and the onboard fake-RAID SATA with a pair of WD Blacks. At least he picked half decent drives.

Plan is to squeeze this along until next spring if I can. ...slowly moving this office to the cloud and then put in a little HP micro toaster server.

ANYways..within the past week server has been exhibiting behavior like its hard drive(s) are falling over the edge. Twice..the DNS service stopped on its own. Launching apps, or say you bring up eventvwr.msc you wait like..literally minutes til it opens. Yesterday server had a few fits..becomes unavail..and the office manager just goes and pulls power cord and powers on again (yeah..if the drives are starting to fail..why not push them totally off the edge of the cliff by giving it a few unexpected shutdowns in a row! Sheeesh!)

Finally it settled down....after a few hours of disk thrashing from the fake-RAID trying to regroup.

Anyways...I downloaded/installed the proper Dell drivers for that T3400, (prior guy didn't load much for drivers, had standard VGA for display, I don't think the chipset INFs, no RAID GUI. In the BIOS setup the pair of RAIDs appeared healthy. Once I got that useless Intel Rapid Storage Technology GUI program installed..it shows the RAID 1 volume with a green check....status "Normal"...but if you click on the advanced...shows "verification errors found:4"...and an option to Verify. I hesitate on clicking that "Verify" option...don't trust this fake RAID stuff.

I wish to "break the mirror" and clone to SSD and ditch the RAID. I supposed normally just pull a disk..and then take the remaining disk..and perhaps (or not) pull it from a special RAID port on the mobo and move to a standard SATA controller port? or...maybe you just toggle an option in the BIOS to turn the first two SATA ports from RAID to standard SATA?

Hopefully Server 08r2 will "roll with the flow" by shifting to a standard SATA controller.

I'm talking out loud here just spewing my thoughts...but if someone has done this "revert RAID to traditional single SATA drive" on a Precision workstation with one of these Intel onboard controllers...on an OS of Vista/08....I'd love to hear some input.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Oh yeah backup...yup got SolarWinds BDR running to a WD Passport...but would also take a second full image backup via Acronis first.

 

[AML]

I have never done that but apparently this is a solution..... https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1951879-intel-sata-raid-controller-clone-raid1-to-single-ssd

 

[freedomit]

I've done it a few years ago on an Acer Altos G330 junk server where one of the drives was failing. As you have a good backup I would do it or other option is why not pull the drives and bare metal recover to a new SSD? If it doesn't work you can then plug the old drives back in again.

 

[Diggs]

I'm curious what you are calling fake RAID? (Software RAID through windows vs. hardware RAID through MB?)

 

[TAPtech]

I think I've done something similar, different hardware but still the Intel softRAID. Power down the system, remove one of the HDD and stash it on the shelf (you'll need it if this all goes south!) and put the new SSD in there. Boot up to Windows and use the Intel software management to rebuild the RAID. Once it's done, power down again and remove the second HDD.

Now when you power back up with the SSD, depending on the operating system, you'll need to perform some task to switch from RAID mode to AHCI mode. I believe this is just changing the storage driver that Windows uses, but not sure what the underlying reason is to be honest. The method varies per operating system, sometimes you need Safe Mode. Once you do that dance, reboot into the BIOS and switch to AHCI mode instead of RAID mode.

Power up and you can remove the intel tools that are left over if you wish.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'm curious what you are calling fake RAID? (Software RAID through windows vs. hardware RAID through MB?)

Fake-RAID is a well known term for the RAID controller on the motherboard that does not have a dedicated CPU, typically an Intel or sometimes an Adaptec..seen a few other alternate brands also. It utilizes the systems CPU to do work, and no back cache. It's not operating system based striping or mirroring that is done strictly from the OS itself...(which is actually better). But it's not a true dedicated hardware RAID card either that does the 100% of the work itself.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

While I've done a few RAID migrations before...pull a drive....put in a new one (larger/faster/better)...rebuild...then pull other drive, put in a second new drive..let the RAID rebuild back to that one, I've never done a RAID migration from SATA to SSD before with this approach.

Wondering if I just pull both drives..and use my Drive Goblin to clone one to an SSD...put the SSD back..reconfigure the mobo to AHCI...run from there.

 

[mikeroq]

I've pulled a drive from a Raid 1 mirror on Intel RST. Cloned it to another drive. I think I went back to a RAID 1 on new drives but you should be able to just clone one to an SSD, or break the mirror. I know recently I had one that the mirror was messed up and both drives showed up in Windows as normal drives (albeit one had older data on it).

I would make an image. Break the raid or pull out one of the drives (assuming they are both in sync). Clone to SSD. Turn off raid in BIOS. Windows might not boot but I use Paragon to get around that. Acronis has a similar feature.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Not as familiar with this scenario, but cloud you pull the drives, use ddrescue to clone each of the drives to a brand new drive, then insert the newly cloned drives in place of the old ones?