Question on P600 Controller Slot Change

I have a bit of a problem with a DL385 server using two P600s and would like
some advice. The initial installation was done in error putting the boot
device on an internal P600 SAS RAID controller in slot 3. Later on another
P600 was added in slot 1 that connects to an external array on an MSA50. A
mirror of the boot device was made to the MSA 50. Unfortunately, this
configuration has some poisonous errors:

A) The secondary mirror - because it is on the slot 1 controller - is
showing up as Disk 0 on the system. I would like to be able to break off
this mirror and save it for an emergency, but when I break the mirror, it is
my primary that is is breaking not the backup.

B) If we attempt to boot the system off of the backup mirror on the MSA50,
it refuses to boot. It might be some disk geometry issue.

This leads to my questions:

1) Can anyone suggest a method for breaking a mirror in Windows 2003 that
lets me specify which of the two mirrored volumes will remain with the
original drive letter? You are able to choose to some degree when you
remove a mirror, but not when you break a mirror, which was a huge oversight
by Microsoft in designing the UI to break a mirror.

2) If we remove the P600 from slot 1, boot the system to let the OS patch up
the references to that controller, then power off and move the controller
from slot 3 to slot 1, is the P600 going to retain all information about the
arrays on that controller, and still be able to boot from it?

I have had P600s lose all of their configuration information in similar
kinds of situations, and I have gotten poor support from HP India and had
data loss. So I'm very sensitive about the safest way to do this.

--
Will

Hi!

At this point, I strongly feel that the safest thing you can do is to
back up all of your data and verify that the backups are good.

Once you've done that, clear off the disks, and arrange both disks and
controller hardware in the correct way. Then get the system back up
and restore your backups.

I don't think you can accomplish this any other way, especially if the
hardware isn't currently installed in the right way.

William

"William R. Walsh" wrote in message
...
At this point, I strongly feel that the safest thing you can do is to
back up all of your data and verify that the backups are good.

Once you've done that, clear off the disks, and arrange both disks and
controller hardware in the correct way. Then get the system back up
and restore your backups.

I don't think you can accomplish this any other way, especially if the
hardware isn't currently installed in the right way.

And if we do all of this work and duplicate the same result, then what?

Your solution just avoids the problem rather than understanding the cause.

--
W