RAID 1 problem

[ingeborgdot]

The raid 1 on my friends machine does not appear to be working correctly. When it starts up it looks for the raid and then when it finds it there is a message that says degraded on one and error on another. What does a person do to get this fixed? I am pretty sure that this means one of the hdd has gone sour. When I do replace it can I replace it with a larger hdd? There are 320 in there now but I would like to replace it with a 500gb or larger. I know that it will convert it to only a 320 but shortly I would like to replace that one with a 500gb also. Will that work? If I would put in a larger hdd let it rebuild and then put in a larger one to replace the one that is still good to get a larger hdd array? Thanks.

 

[pjamme]

If only one is showing a sign of predictive failuure or degradtion you can swap it for a new one and RAID 1 will rebuild it to match the good one. If you use a larger hard drive it will not be able to use the extra space as it will match the other one exactly
However if you have two hard drives showing as degraded or erred you are probably going to need to replace both. At that time you can go bigger since you are doing a fresh install anyway.

For others that see your post, it would be helpful to know the error, OS, HDD type ( I am assuming SATA due to the size)

 

[ingeborgdot]

Vista Home Premium SP2
Seagate 320GB SATA
When you restart the computer it looks for the raid setup. It shows the 2 drives but it then turns red and #1 says degraded and #2 says error. When I hit F10 and go in it just shows
degraded and error for the discs.

 

[ingeborgdot]

I have placed the new hdd in and it shows it is a good hdd with the smart test. The problem is how do I rebuild it? There are no options anywhere to do this. It is a gigabyte board with an Nvidia nForce 570sli running it. When I go into F10 it gives me 3 choices of what to do but when I hit R for rebuild it just goes back. There is no other option any place that I can see to rebuild. WHAT do I do?

 

[mailpup]

Perhaps you need to format the hard drive through Disk Management first. Of course, you would have to use another PC for this.

 

[ingeborgdot]

I did not think you had to format it when it goes into raid. I may be wrong though.

 

[ingeborgdot]

Ok, now I have a question on the hdd itself. Can I partition the hdd and then use the one part for the raid and the other for extra storage? Is that possible? Just a thought.

 

[mailpup]

Yes, I believe so although I've never set up a RAID array. During the installation of Windows on the RAID array, you will have an opportunity to create partitions just as if you were using a single drive.

 

[DelJo63]

Yes, I believe so although I've never set up a RAID array. During the installation of Windows on the RAID array, you will have an opportunity to create partitions just as if you were using a single drive.

Reminder: Microsoft does not recommend Raid-X for the boot drive.

 

[mailpup]

Yes, there's that too.

 

[ingeborgdot]

Is there a reason for that?