Changing disk on RAID5

Hello!
Im about to change a disk on our RAID5 Xserve RAID.
The RAID is currently protected, but im changing the disk because of a previous disk error.
I have read the RAIDAdmin1.2 and the XserveRAID_UsersGuide from www.apple.com/server/documentation. However these manuals contain a lot of contradicting information...
The manual says that the system is hotswappable and one should be able to change both disks and other components while the system is running.
Then we are told to not remove drives that are part of the RAID, as that could result in dataloss..
If some one could clarify this for me that would be great:
* Can I remove a disk from an Xserve RAID with RAID5 while it is running?
* When I replace the disk with the new disk I received from Apple do I need to format it?
* Or will the disk automatically be prepared and included in the RAID?
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

The manual says that the system is hotswappable and one should be able to change both disks and other components while the system is running.
Then we are told to not remove drives that are part of the RAID, as that could result in dataloss..
You should be cautious before pulling any drive from an array. Pulling a drive could result in data loss since there are many factors to consider.
For example, RAID 5 can tolerate a disk failure (or removal) RAID 0 can not, yet they are both 'arrays'.
Even in the case of RAID 5, pulling the wrong disk could be disastrous. It will also take several hours to rebuild the array and if another drive fails during that time window you'll be in trouble, too.
I think that's the sentiment behind the second statement - it could result in data loss depending on the particular circumstances.
In this case, if you're sure you have the right disk set, and there are no other failures on the RAID 5 array, you should be OK.
As for swapping the disk itself, yes, they are hot-swappable, as are certain other components such as the power supply and fan trays (but not the controller cards).
You can just pull the drive and replace it with another. The XServe RAID will automatically prepare the drive and start the rebuild process.

Similar Messages

Time Machine "Change Disk" Behavior Question

Is it possible to perform a TM backup to two separate disks? (to have a secondary complete backup in case of failure of the primary?) I know you can select "Change Disk" from the TM preferences, but if you do, can you go back and select the primary disk and resume backing up to that original sparsebundle? Or do you have to start all over again?
Thanks for the help!

You can only use TM to backup to one disc at a time - if you want a second complete backup you would need such as SuperDuper which would give you a bootable clone, although it would have to be on a separate disk or partition to the TM backups.
Provided you do not change the name of your computer, you can re-join the TM backups from when you switched off.
Joe

Time Machine - Change Disk Button?

I just posted a question regarding Time Machine, here in this forum. I tried to add to it but it kept getting rejected, so I am asking the added question here:
By the way, I'm going in circles trying to find out what people mean when they refer to the "star wars" symbol, button or icon. It's amazing that no matter how I word it, all my search result assume I already know what and where it is, and rather than explain it, go on talking about all other things in Time Machine. And I have followed numerous links, suggestions, troubleshooting guides, etc. Nothing tells me what this is.
Nor, for that matter, can I find out why, "Change Disk" is nowhere to be found in my Time Machine preferences, yet when I search for that, I get all sorts of tips on all sorts of related things. I only have "Select Disk."
Anyone? Thanks.

I'm not surprised you didn't find it -- it was titled +Time Machine Pref Pane not responding,+ and it was a long one. Plus it's not marked "solved."
But now that this one is more descriptive, and marked "solved," the next person who looks will probably find it!
And thanks for the star.

TS1337 I don't see [Preferences] or [Change Disk] when I click on Time Machine

I need to change my backup volume for Time Machine. But I don't see [Preferences] or [Change Disk] when I click on Time Machine from the System Preferences.

SharonLee123 wrote:
As I stated, I'm not a mac person, so sorry about that.
Not a problem. That's what we're here for.
It's currently backing up a sub folder onto an external drive (my backup drive). This is why I looking for [change].
I am trying to backup everything on my data/application Drive, from the Root, so it gets everything on the drive.
By default, Time Machine will back up your entire system. If you're sure it's only backing up one folder, you (or someone) must have excluded all sorts of other things. Click the Options button on the Preferences window to see the exclusion list.
It should look something like this:
But with lots and lots of exclusions.
I suspect your whole Mac really is getting backed-up, but you're just not seeing them. What you see in the "Star Wars" display depends on what's on your screen when you Enter Time Machine. If you have a Finder window showing just that sub-folder, when you Enter Time Machine that's all you'll see.
If you start with a Finder window showing, say, your home folder, that's what you'll see in the "Star Wars" display. If your Finder windows have sidebars, once in Time Machine you can select other things in the sidebar to display.
You might want to review the Time Machine Tutorial, and perhaps browse Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #15A.
Don't hesitate to post back if you still have questions or problems.

Changed disk for Time Machine -- delete old backup folder?

I got a bigger external drive for backups so I can use the smaller drive for data. I changed disk for TM in System Prefs, and all seems to be well; it's backing up to the new drive. Can I delete the previous TM backup folder on the smaller drive? Or does the new backup location need it for some kind of reference?
Thanks!

If you change TM destinations, it will restart from the beginning (or, resume if a previous backup was started on that volume in the past for the computer in question). In other words, you are safe to delete the old backup.

Time Machine Change Disk - Getting original backups

I wanted to look at another disk which I had been using for backup before getting a Time Machine. When I switched back, I answered too many questions and ended up disconnecting the Time Machine and did a reboot.
When I finally reconnected to the Time Machine (and the internet), I found out I am doing a full backup and the original backups.backupdb does not show up on this Time Machine, even though the space is claimed.
What do I need to do to start backing up only the changed disks to the original backups.backupdb?
Send thoughts to mailto:[email protected]

Juan Terrazas1 wrote:
What I wonder is if I delete the TM plist then where is TM Preferences reading its information?
No, the only place that's kept is in plist in the /Library folder at the top level of the drive.
Sometimes there's a file with the same name in a user library, but it doesn't have that info. That's why it looks like either the file didn't get deleted, or the wrong one was deleted, or System Preferences was still running, with the info in memory.
Is there another plist file that I should delete?
No.
But let's be clear; do you mean the disk is still shown as your Time Machine drive on the Preferences panel (after Name):
|
|
or that it shows up in the list of items you can select when you click +Select Disk:+
|

TimeMachine unable to change disk

Hi,
I'm trying to change my disk for Time Machine, but when I click on the Change Disk button, nothing happen.
What is going on here?

Thanks, that was exactly it.
But I do not see how it came to be, as it was working fine before...

Changed disks in my RAID, Aperture lost all referenced masters.

I have a G-Speed eS RAID system. I had 4 X 1TB disks.
I decided to change the hard disks to 2TB ones to double my storage capacity.
I retained the same volume name. I backed up the 2.5TB of data to 3 other disks and then copied it back to my upgraded RAID.
So I have a completely identical file structure. My photos were in /Volumes/GS/photo, and this is where they are now. However Aperture lost all connections to the 35000 referenced files.
It seems that there is no way to tell Aperture that old /Volumes/GS and new /Volumes/GS is the same location from my point of view (is your point of view different?). This means I have to reconnect each one of the 100+ projects manually. I DO NOT LIKE THAT. Am I missing something, or is this a nasty oversight? Don't tell me that this is a "feature" and one can only move REFERENCED masters from within Aperture...
Note: Repairing or rebuilding the library does not help.

Your suggestion works, but
1) You have to first select all photos in the "photos" smart album. If you do select them all, "Reconnect All" will not work.
2) Most important, after reconnecting, I also told Aperture to rebuild my library. And it lost them again... The photos got connected to a <null> named drive which is shown as offline.
We are talking about a big deficit of reliability here...
I had a backup of my Aperture Library. So I reconnected the files again, without a Library rebuild this time.
But what if I need to rebuild my library in the future?? I AM SCARED...
No need to mention that I have lost all day moving around many gigabytes of data, reconnecting files, etc etc. This is hardly a productivity boost.
The worst part is that I like a lot the Aperture UI and I hate the alternative.
But Aperture is unfortunately unreliable.
Just play enough time with the loupe on my MacPro and the application will crash.

Way to merge original TM Disk to changed disk?

Changing Time Machine Disk
I just changed my time machine disk from an external drive attached locally, to a larger external drive attached to another computer.
The Local disk has a folder structure for TM backups and the networked shared drive has a sparse dmg image housing the backup folder structure. When I have both Drives available, I can go back in time to when the first disk started backing up. However, when I eject the original disk, I can only go back in time to when the backups started on the second disk.
I do not want to loose the safety of TM's backups by retiring the original disk. Is there any way to merge the backups from the original disk to the new disk without loosing history?

What if you move the Backup folder to the new disk before you start using it in Time Machine? Actually I suppose you could do it even after since the folders are all named by date. Should get you in the same place? Or is there an index that won't be updated?
Give it a try if you don't mind. Copy the old backups to the other location, eject the old disk and see what you get in TM.
+R
Message was edited by: Ryan D.

Fate of current backups when changing disk

I'm having trouble finding info here or in desktop help to support a strategic decision about how to deal with a Time Machine backup partition that's getting full. (After I broke down and bought iWork and iLife, four years later, and installed them the other night, TM announced its disk was full and my oldest backup was now from Dec. 1. Its files had previously gone back to August.)
I have another partition with about 30 GB more available space than my backups currently occupy. Maybe 40 GB more, with some housecleaning. My impression from what I have been able to find so far is that under Leopard (NOT Snow Leopard, can't run it) I have four choices:
1. Duplicate current TM partition onto new TM partition. This will transfer existing backups to the newly designated partition and allow TM to pick up where it left off, but it will also erase everything currently on that partition, including the OS. Right?
2. Simply switch backup to the other partition. This will cause TM to make a full backup on that partition and go from there. That means I have to keep the old backups on the original partition for a while so I can access them if needed via the "Browse other Time Machine disks" menu command. Right?
3. Enter Time Machine and delete some of the backups, or remove specific items from them, so TM will have more room and won't have to delete again for a while (hopefully, giving me enough time to implement additional storage).
4. Cross my fingers.
Any confirmations, corrections or recommendations appreciated.

This is weird...
I finally realized this morning that for the time being I had enough space on one of my external drive's other partitions that, rather than having to find somewhere else to stash the data on it, I could just subdivide it and create a partition for Time Machine that would be considerably larger than the existing backup partition. I went through the process of using Disk Utility to "restore" the original partition to the newly created one. (3-1/2 hours, ugh.) Then I changed the name of the old backup "drive" in the Finder so it wouldn't be the same as the new one. (Besides encouragement from Király's reply above, my strategy and procedure were all based on the info in the very nice FAQ here--thanks to Pondini for that. Apple's canned support material was almost no help at all on this.)
Everything looked fine to me; the new partition showed the exact same contents as the original backup partition--the backups.backupdb folder, with the same modified date. So I unmounted the G-drive, turned its power off, and went about some other digital housekeeping. When that was done (several reboots and a permissions repair later) and all was running well I turned the G-drive back on so I could select the new partition for Time Machine to use.
Well, the darn thing immediately started chattering away, with its little white light on the front grille flickering busily, although it had not been addressed. Not by me anyway. It continued to be quite active for about 10 minutes, then quieted down somewhat, but it's still making its scritchy-scratchy noises.
What the heck could it be doing?? Is there a way to find out? I'm a little reluctant to initiate the TM disk switch as long as it continues talking to itself. Even if it's something perfectly normal following a partition change, I'd appreciate understanding the behavior. Thanks.

Can i change disk i my mac mini?

Can i change my harddrive in my Mac mini 2011. I like to install 2 pcs. ssd drive insted of my 2 psc 500 gb 7200.
best regards
Michael

There are a number of places you can go to see how to replace drives in the new mini. iFixit.com has instructions and there are videos on youtube.
It wasn't designed for user replacement but it can be done.

How to change disk parttition name?

I have new system, V890HA, i want change the name for part 6,7 to another name because it's still unssiggened, how to do that?
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 0 - 11069 107.43GB (11070/0/0) 225296640
1 swap wu 11070 - 13082 19.54GB (2013/0/0) 40968576
2 backup wm 0 - 14086 136.71GB (14087/0/0) 286698624
3 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
4 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
6 unassigned wm 13083 - 13186 1.01GB (104/0/0) 2116608
7 unassigned wm 13187 - 13212 258.38MB (26/0/0) 529152

I'm really sorry, yes i mean is how to rename it...just that, thank you very much...
root@osssvr-1 # metastat
d115: Mirror
Submirror 0: d116
State: Okay
Submirror 1: d117
State: Okay
Pass: 1
Read option: roundrobin (default)
Write option: parallel (default)
Size: 2116608 blocks (1.0 GB)
d116: Submirror of d115
State: Okay
Size: 2116608 blocks (1.0 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t0d0s6 0 No Okay Yes
d117: Submirror of d115
State: Okay
Size: 2116608 blocks (1.0 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t1d0s6 0 No Okay Yes
d103: Mirror
Submirror 0: d104
State: Okay
Submirror 1: d105
State: Okay
Pass: 1
Read option: roundrobin (default)
Write option: parallel (default)
Size: 40968576 blocks (19 GB)
d104: Submirror of d103
State: Okay
Size: 40968576 blocks (19 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t0d0s1 0 No Okay Yes
d105: Submirror of d103
State: Okay
Size: 40968576 blocks (19 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t1d0s1 0 No Okay Yes
d100: Mirror
Submirror 0: d101
State: Okay
Submirror 1: d102
State: Okay
Pass: 1
Read option: roundrobin (default)
Write option: parallel (default)
Size: 225296640 blocks (107 GB)
d101: Submirror of d100
State: Okay
Size: 225296640 blocks (107 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t0d0s0 0 No Okay Yes
d102: Submirror of d100
State: Okay
Size: 225296640 blocks (107 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t1d0s0 0 No Okay Yes
Device Relocation Information:
Device Reloc Device ID
c1t1d0 Yes id1,ssd@n500000e0136ffd40
c1t0d0 Yes id1,ssd@n500000e0135c9e20
root@osssvr-1 # metastat -p
d115 -m d116 d117 1
d116 1 1 c1t0d0s6
d117 1 1 c1t1d0s6
d103 -m d104 d105 1
d104 1 1 c1t0d0s1
d105 1 1 c1t1d0s1
d100 -m d101 d102 1
d101 1 1 c1t0d0s0
d102 1 1 c1t1d0s0
root@osssvr-1 # metadb
flags first blk block count
a m p luo 16 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s7
a p luo 8208 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s7
a p luo 16400 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s7
a p luo 16 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s7
a p luo 8208 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s7
a p luo 16400 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s7

Change Disk and copy files

I've had Leopard installed for several weeks. Started using Time Machine with a relatively small external HD. I now have a larger external HD and want to start using the new one. I know how to switch to the new HD, but is there any way to get the previous backups moved to the new HD - and have it continue to backup from there? Can I just copy the files from one to the other?

Welcome to Apple Discussions.
Although I haven't tried this myself, I don't see any reason this should be a problem. You may be asked to enter your administrator name and password but beyond that it should be the same as copying any other folder.
I would also suggest that when you connect the new external drive that you go into Time Machine and select it again as your TM disk.
Hope this helps.
David

Changing disk geometry with fdisk

I have a Sun X2100 server that I am attempting to add a second disk to. I want to use SVM to mirror the root disk to the new disk. I made sure that the new disk was the same part number (540-6595) as the existing root disk. Both disks have a label that says "SATA 80GB 7200RPM" and both have the same part number on them, yet once I installed the new disk, I discovered that the new disk has different geometry than the first disk. The original disk reports "cyl 38735 alt 2 hd 64 sec 63" while the new disk reports "cyl 9718 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63".
The fact that two disks with the same part number have different geometry leads me to believe that the geometry must be soft and therefore can be modified. And after reading the man page for the fdisk command, I am further convinced of this. The "-S" argument looks like it will allow me to write out a different geometry to the second disk and make it match the root disk. However, it does not appear to have any affect.
I used the following command to read the geometry from the first disk: "fdisk -W /tmp/geom /dev/rdsk/c1d0p0". Then I used this command to write that geometry to the second disk: "fdisk -S /tmp/geom /dev/rdsk/c2d0p0". But nothing happens. There are no error messages or anything, but when I look at the target disk, it is the same as before.
Has anyone else attempted to do this or know anything about why two disks with identical part numbers have different geometry?
By the way, I have a couple other X2100 servers that were purchased with two disk drives in them. All have the same part number (540-6595) and all disks have the same geometry as my target server's root disk: "cyl 38735 alt 2 hd 64 sec 63".
Thanks,
-Mark

That is true, but I can't lay out physical partitions on disks using sectors as the size specifier. Physical partitions have to end on cylinder boundaries. Since there are fewer cylinders on the second disk but the disks are the same size (80G), the cylinders are larger on the second disk. The result of that is that I cannot create partitions on the second disk that are exactly the same size as their counterpart on the first disk; one of them is going to be slightly larger than the other. That is okay as long as the source mirror is smaller than the target mirror. But having the partitions on the second disk all being slightly larger than their counterparts on the first disk means that, eventually, one partition has to end up being smaller than its counterpart if I am using the entire disk. So that means that SVM will not mirror a partition on the first disk to a smaller partition on the second disk.
The bottom line here is that I need the geometry to match, or at a minimum, the cylinder counts need to be exact multiples of each other. It looks like the fdsik command should allow me to modify the geometry on a disk, but so far I have ben unsuccessful in making it work.
-Mark

Encore CS3 crashes when changing disk drives

Burning a compilation from Premiere CS3 to Encore CS3 using Export to Encore. When Premiere finishes encoding and launches Encore to create DVD image, Encore keeps defaulting to my CD-R drive and not my DVD-R drive.
Each time I have to cancel the operation, and then manually change the dropdown recorder selector from the CD to the DVD drive. And EVERY TIME I do this Encore crashes.
Since there doesn't seem to be a way to force Encore to remember which drive I want to use for recording as a default, this software is totally useless to me.
Does anyone know of a way to make Encore remember a specific disc drive to use for recording?

You could try setting the DVD-R drive as Master, not the CD-R.
The bad news is that this means opening up the computer & either resetting the drive jumpers from CS (Cable Select) to Master & Slave, or if they are already set to Master & Slave, then they need reversing.
This cannot be done in software as it is a matter of their physical position on the cable.
To ensure correct pickup, it would be a good idea to go into Control Panel/System/device manager (
i before
opening the system - and uninstall both optical drives (right-click on the drive & select "uninstall".
The next time you boot, thedrives should be detected in their new configuration.

Changing disk on RAID5

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for