Can I reconfigure Array without losing OS data?

[drew3739]

I have an HP Proliant G4 Server in a production environment with five (5) 36.4GB drives configured in a raid 5.

I have a spare G4 sitting around with 0 drives that was given to me. Functional but with 0 HD's. In the event of a hardware failure on the production G4 (besides the HD's themselves), could I pull the 5 drives from it and move them to the spare G4 (same hardware) and reconfigure the Array to raid 5 and still keep the data in tact? Last I remember once you create a new logical drive it will delete the data (or at least become unbootable). IS there any third party application to help keeping in mind the hardware is the same.

 

[sminlal]

This is the kind of thing that I'd never try based on what someone else told me. If I were you I'd try to find 3 spare drives somewhere so that you could actually create a 3-drive array and test the migration to see if it works or not.

 

[drew3739]

So you mean get three spare drives and just create a raid 5 array on the spare, then migrate the drives and see if it just picks them up? Would they have to be the same capacity?

 

[sminlal]

If it works with a 70GB 3-drive RAID 5 array, I can't imagine why it wouldn't work with a 140GB 5-drive RAID 5 array. But if you're really paranoid, then try to scrounge up 5 drives to do an exact test with.

 

[goobaah]

Better yet, backup that data and try it with the exact hardware that you are running now. Its not that much space to back it up. .... Edit... I just read that it is production. Hope you can take the downtime to do it. Do you know the exact model? There are a lot of different configs for those servers from what I see on HP's sight. This should be possible to do. How else could the hardware handle a backplane failure or something like that. A disk is not the only thing that can fail in a RAID system.