Barry L. Kline <mailto:blkline at attglobal.net> tapped at Friday, May 26, 2006 4:48 PM: > Mark Schoonover wrote: >> Barry L. Kline <mailto:blkline at attglobal.net> tapped at Friday, May >> 26, 2006 2:56 PM: >> > >> >> I'd like to know how things went with software raid when you've lost >> a drive in a mirror or RAID5. The times that's happened to me, I >> could never recover the partition - had to always restore from tape. >> After that point, it was hardware only. Software RAID works fine, as >> long as there's no problems. >> > > I have lost a drive in a mirror and had no trouble recovering it. The > steps are basically the same for a RAID 5 system as they are for the > mirror. > > What I figured out early on was that I didn't want to be discovering > how RAID recovery works while under the gun to get a failed drive > replaced. I tried that once and found it extremely stressful. > > What you might want to do (assuming that you have an old PC and a > couple > of old drives around) is build a test system that you can experiment > with. Today, you don't need the spare hardware laying around. You can download VMware Server for free, and create what you need virtually. You'll accomplish the same thing, without the added expense and space of using actual hardware. I did that and now have a good working knowledge of the > recovery > steps. ('tho I took good notes because the frequence of this occuring > has been, for me, rather low). Failed drive in another machine? > BRING > IT ON! (okay, okay... I don't want to tempt the gods and *really* > have > that failure, but I'm not as concerned about it as I once was). > > Barry I'd rather not bring it on, but there are times it's going to happen! Mark