SUMMARY: how to swap T5220's with hardware mirrored drives

I had two replies.  Steve Hastings & Chirs Hoogendyk.  Unfortunately, I 
failed in my attempts.

I was advised to test thoroughly by booting off either/both of the 
mirror drives and making sure things were fine before swapping.

It was noted that the T5220's have LSI MegaRAID cards, but it's unclear 
where the configuration is stored: on idprom (doubt it greatly), in the 
raid card, or on the disks (or multiple locations).

My testing was an utter failure.  The only thing that worked was booting 
off the primary disk (with or without the secondary disk).  I couldn't 
boot off the secondary disk either in its original location or by moving 
it to slot 0.  It's been several days; I can't remember the error, but I 
believe it just couldn't find any boot code.  I did not try to add the 
boot block to it; I just can't believe that's necessary with the 
mirroring done by the raid card (the OS sees only one disk device).

I also couldn't move just disk0 to another machine and boot off it 
there.  The only thing that worked was with the original disk0 in the 
original machine.

In the end, I ended up installing the OS from scratch on my spare T5220 
and only moving my extra 6x drives in the zfs pool to the replacement 
machines.  The idprom was moved as well with zero negative effects, so 
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the mirror config.

Thanks for the suggestions from Chris and Steve.  I hope anyone else who 
attempts this has better success than I do.

Tom Lieuallen
Oregon State University

On 5/9/12 7:47 AM, Tom Lieuallen wrote:
> I have two T5220's.  The first is 4x core and has all 8x drive bays
> filled.  The first two drives are hardware mirrored using raidctl.  The
> other 6x drives are in a zfs pool.
>
> The second T5220 has just two disks hardware mirrored.  This machine has
> 8x core and more memory.
>
> I'd like to pull the ID prom and drives from the first machine and put
> in the 2nd machine.  I'm not concerned with the zfs disks; I know
> they'll just plain work.  I'm concerned about the hardware mirrored
> drives.  The ID prom will need to move due to some licensed software.
>
> The question is where this hardware mirrored information is stored and
> whether I'd mess things up with this move.
>
> thank you for any advice.  I'll summarize
>
> Tom Lieuallen
> Oregon State University
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