Temporary RAID repair

[HCHTech]

Stopped in to a small MD office (Doc is a residential customer of mine) today after a panic call for help. Their single computer won't boot. It's a small Thinkserver, TS140, I think, running Win7 Pro. Incredibly, he says he has a backup. I decide to take it to do a proper backup & diagnosis. Once I get it back to the bench, I see there are two drives in a RAID1. One drive is failing according to the RAID configuration screen. There's no RAID card, the drives are just plugged into the motherboard SATA ports and I can't make out any numbers by the ports. I remove each drive individually and run it through gSmartControl. Sure enough, one is failing and one is good.

The drives are Seagate Constellation ES, 500GB. I don't keep anything like this in stock, so I decided to order one and temporarily use a WD Blue to get him back up and running. The rest of the hardware passed my tests, so after making an image of the good drive, I mount it along with a new WD Blue and boot it up and set the RAID to remake the mirror. I took it back to his office so he could use it while we waited on the new drive.

I'm going through all of this and wondering if I should have just pulled the bad drive onsite (assuming I could have identified it). I'll bet it would have booted then. He would have lost the protection of the RAID while we waited for a new drive, but would have been back running a few hours sooner. I think I did the right thing, but I'm not sure. What do you think?

 

[nlinecomputers]

Either way works and if you are willing to loan the drive no harm done. Other than the time you need to spend to break and rebuild the mirror a second time. And the wear and tear on the drive you loaned them. Just be sure and dban that drive after you remove it. If this is an MD then you have Hipaa laws to consider.

 

[HCHTech]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Good point about DBAN. I think I'm comfortable with loaning the drive, it was one of my scratch drives that I formatted.

 

[Markverhyden]

You did the right thing. Data protection is at the top of the list. So pulling, testing and imaging is the proper process.