Upgrading Xserve with RAID set

Hi,
I have been asked to upgrade a copy of Server 10.3 to 10.4. I don't like upgrading, so will do a clean install and then restore all of the SA and WGM data back into the server. Here is the question:
The XServe has 3 bays - bay 1 has the startup disk and bay 2 and 3 have a mirrored RAID set. Is the RAID config data held in the OS, so if I reinstall the system will the configuration data for the RAID set be lost and will I have to re-RAID the server? Or is the config data stored on the drive and so a re-install won't affect the RAID set?
Many thanks,
JS
iMac G5 17" 2 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, 600 GB HDD Mac OS X (10.4.9)
iMac G5 17" 2 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, 600 GB HDD Mac OS X (10.4.9)
iMac G5 17" 2 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, 600 GB HDD Mac OS X (10.4.9)

I would like to know if the RAID 'config' data is
actually written onto the drive or is stored in the
OS. I first thought it would be stored in software
because Disk Utility uses software RAID, but then
again a single drive has the partition data on the
drive.
James,
If you think about it a bit, software RAID information has to be on the drive because the volume becomes a RAID before a filesystem is created and before an install is done. Likewise, a hardware raid is done on the interface card and comes up the same way. Neither can know which of the members of the mirror are available at first boot; otherwise, there would be a single point of failure during boot, and the whole purpose of a RAID 1 mirror would be lost.
The bootstrap starts on the mirror primary, then, as the driver is brought online and before any writes are done, the driver collects the members of the RAID 1 mirror set and forms the mirror. If the mirror primary isn't available, then the mirror secondary is used (which has an exact copy except for stuff indicating that it is the secondary). All this happens normally during boot, as if from a single non-RAID drive, until the cutover is made to RAID early in the driver intialization.
That's why booting from a RAID 0 (stripe) is so hard - all of the data is not present on a single drive. It can be done, but it is hard and requires special care during the boot.
You really do want to make the upgrade to AppleRAID 2 before spending time on the update, though. There are details in this article on afp548.com:
http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=AppleRAID2-in-Depth
Russ
Xserve G5 2.0 GHz 2 GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.8) Apple Hardware RAID, ATTO UL4D, Exabyte VXA-2 1x10 1u

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Problem with raid set on xserve

Hi to all!
I hope you can help me with a big problem that I have with a Xserve of the work.
Yesterday afternoon I come to the work and my partners mentioned to me that the web pages were not going. I tried to connect with ARD but he was not answering. I had to move to the building where the server is racked and when I connected a monitor a it was showing me a folder icon with an interrogation icon.
Since this had happened to me in my Mac of the office once, I initiated from the installation DVD to see if I could repair permissions and/or the discs with the Disk Utility. For my surprise (and terror) does not show any volume or disk except the DVD.
I got into the RAID Utility in the menu and there I could see the discs but the RAID Sets does not appear... We had mounted since we install the machine a raid 5 with 3 discs and 2 volumes on this raid set.
Then, from the Terminal, doing "diskutil list" it's show no volume on any disk.
I suppose that something has happened with the volumes and the raid cannot be mounted...
Is there any way to mount the volumes again? Something similar to the "fixmbr" that I believe that there are in others OS to restore the volumes tables...
Is there any way to mount again the RAID without losing the information from the discs?
Do you know that can be happening?
PS: It is a Xserve of the last ones, with Mac OS X 10.6.8. I have already tried to reset the PRAM and it keeps on doing the same.

The Server Monitr does say anything. It doesnt pick up any server. I tried to add the XServe in the Server Monitor, but it keeps waiting for a reply after I have put in the username, password and IP address.
It is an XServe with a Mirror software RAID on the 2 x Internal Hard Drives within the XServe
I am not using the SAN software
There have been reports of fault latchs on the Apple Drive Bay Modules. Do you think this could be causing the units to dismount?

NAS with RAID set up

I want to set up a NAS with RAID option. I have my imac (with leopard) and couple of PCs (vista) at home. I also have an xbox which i use media player (sorry no apple TV) for photos etc. Do you have any suggestion which is the best option that with support both PC and Mac. I would also like to use my NAS as my itune server and store my other media file.
I am not a digitally savvy person and am looking for a simple option.

I have been happy with the ReadyNAS line from Netgear (formerly Infrant). They have information and very active user forums where you can ask specific questions at: http://www.readynas.com

Intel Xserve With Raid card Remote install Question

I am currently trying to remotely install OSX server on an Intel 2008 Xserve with a newly fitted raid card (Apple) I get as far as choosing which HD to install but none of the drives show? (there are all Apple brand 300GB SAS)
Can I only install it locally on the machine if a Raid card/SAS drives are in there??
Thanks

Hi,
I just started to do the same. Did you find a solution?
Thanks,
Hans

For the life of me I CAN NOT GET WIN7 TO BOOT WITH RAID SET UP (S20 THINKSTATION)

I've felt like setting up RAID 5 on D10 was much easier, so I've done this before. However I have not set this up on a Win7 machine on D20 or S20.
I have an image of win7 I have to use.
I start with 3 clean disc all the same. I set up raid in bios. I use CTRL+M to set up RAID array.
I load my image onto the RAID array.
When it starts to boot it crapps out at the "Starting Windows" splash screen.
I tried altering my image by making sure I had the Lenovo driver loaded that contain ICH10R driver. Still same thing.
Please Help!!!!
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Yep. That was the issue and what was causing the startup to BSOD.
Just needed to tell windows to load the RAID drivers when booting. Found instructions that worked for me on another site. Instructions below to "REGEDIT"
Exit all Windows-based programs.
Press [Win] + R or take the RUN option from the start menu.
Now type regedit there and press Enter Key to open up the Registry Editor Window.
If you receive the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue.
Locate and then click the following registry subkeys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorV
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStor
For each location above: In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
In the Value data box, type 0 [3 is default], and then click OK.
On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.
Restart your computer
Go to UEFI/BIOS and enable RAID, Save & Reboot

Very slow Time Machine Initial Backup to Leopard Server on Xserve with RAID

I'm having trouble backing up my iMac to my Xserve running leopard with dual drobos as my time machine drives
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Network: 1gbs via catalyst switches on essentially unloaded segment (a couple of folks reading emails)
Source Machine: iMac 24" 3.06 Core2Duo with 8gb RAM
Most important fact: nothing has changed on the server (other than usual updates)
Doing an initial backup of the iMac over the network, and getting peak of about 100Kb/sec, and much of the time it seems to have stalled. Given that the machine has like 230GB to backup, this is going to take a real long while. When I query activity monitor on both the client and Xserve, they are both virtually idle with all resources free (lots of free RAM/Disk/CPU). Neither machine is running any apps right now during the test (other than filesharing, but nobody is using as the office is empty today)
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Should I be concerned that the TimeMachineBuddy widget is producing tons of error messages in the system console (and doesn't seem to work)
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785GTM-E45 SATAs Not Detected with RAID Set to AHCI

I have a Seagate 640GB on SATA 1 and a WD 250GB on SATA 2. These are detected and show in BIOS when RAID is set at IDE. Disappear when I set to AHCI.
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It is in the Basic Features Screen. SATA drives show undetected here, when AHCI is selected.
Funny and sad, that the manual's BIOS pages skip over this whole area and goes to the Cell portion. But, I think I figured out, that though it is not mentioned anywhere, that it appears that the SATA drive area under basic features, is only IDE devices.
Under Advanced Features and Boot Sequence, I found that the drives showed up and could be selected.

Rebuilding RAID set takes 2 hrs?

Don't know if this is the right place for my post ...
I have a 160gb Raid set (mirrored, 2 disk 160gb each), automatic rebuild). One disk failed, showing degraded in Disk Utility. After replacing the failed HD with a new one disk utility started to rebuild but it took 2hrs...... Is this normal.
I don't have any experience with RAID set and was wondering if this was normal.
Thanks
F
10.5.1
Powermac G5.
2 160GB external HD mounted as RAID mirrored (Mac OS X journaled extented)

Yes, that's normal -or, at least, not unusual.

Repairing RAID set takes a long time?

I have a 160gb Raid set (mirrored, 2 disk 160gb each), automatic rebuild). One disk failed, showing degraded in Disk Utility. After replacing the failed HD with a new one disk utility started to rebuild but it took 2hrs...... Is this normal.
I don't have any experience with RAID set and was wondering if this was normal.
Thanks
F
10.5.1
Powermac G5.
2 160GB external HD mounted as RAID mirrored (Mac OS X journaled extented)

Yes, It has to copy the entire master disk to the new slave disk plus keeping track of all changes to the master disk at the same time. It will go faster if no applications are running during the copy.

DKA790GX Platinum, Unable to delete Raid set.

Back in mid February I wrote in with an issue regarding side port memory, this problem evolved to where the system would shut down even whilst in Bios. I used your wonderful flash utility to update the Bios from 1.1 to 1.3 and finally to 1.6 with no improvement, thanks again to Bas and Walker X for their kind input.
The board was returned and six weeks later a replacement arrived, this new board is now up and running with a fresh installation of XP pro and latest drivers from MSI.
The problem I have now, two of the samsung drives were setup as Raid 0 on the old board, when connected to the new board, bios changed to accommodate, from boot the drives are scanned and reported as ID 01 Mode 2+0 Raid 0 LD Size 639.99 Track-Mapping 65535/255/63 Functional. when I press Ctrl F to enter fast build utility, I am taken to the Bios setup screen? and not fast build.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
I would like to format these drives for re use, can I do this in windows or must I delete Raid set first via fast build utility?
The fresh installation drive is disconnected during the above process.
System spec.
DKA790GX Platinum with 1.6 Bios chip.
AMD Athlon X2 7750BE Retail.
Crucial 2x2GB DDR PC2-8500.
3X Samsung F1 SATA 11 320GB Drives.
Jeantech Orchid 500Watt PSU

Thanks Svet for your fast responce, please excuse my lack of knowledge on Raid, the above was the first Raid set ever configured.
With Raid set to IDE in Bios, this shows as one drive (E) in my computer, do I format this?

Macbook Pro with Dual hard drives. Scratch Disk, Memory 64bit, Raid, Set Up Questions.

Hello, this is my first post.
I just upgraded from the original 2006 17" Macbook Pro to a refurbished 13" Macbook Pro 2.53GHZ 4GB Ram (2009 model).
I bought the MCE Tech Optibay and installed it (if you dont know anything about it, ask me, its amazing.) So now I have 2x 500GB 7200RPM Seagate hard drives installed.
I am running Snow Leopard, CS3, Lightroom 1.4.
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I am looking to upgrade to CS5 and Lightroom 3 here within this month or so. Or if I get anxious, tomorrow, haha.
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Any info will appreciated.
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I think thats all I have on my brain right now. I may have more questions, or I can guarantee I will have more later.
Thanks alot.

First the scratch. Like you said, most everyone has a different take on scratch discs but I'd guess you're wasting one heck of a lot of hard drive space using all 500 GB for Scratch, did I read that right? If I did read it correctly YES, partition it and get some use out of it!!
I've got a unibody MBP 2.93GHz, OS 10.5.8, CS3 & PS 5 (running in 32bit mode), and 8 gigs of ram. I've partitioned the one 300 GB drive so 50GB is scratch, the other partition is for OS, & Apps, and documents (images).
I use LR 2 first than export to PS 5 to finish up. My photos get to be 300MB to 500MB in size and both versions of PS work on this setup just fine. Using PS 5 in 64 bit mode is faster opening files but NON of my plugin's are 64 bit yet, that's why I'm still stuck in 32 bit mode.
Not knowing what size or kind of files you work on makes giving advice a bit tough but try setting the status indicator (don't know the right name for it) in the bottom left corner of any PS open file to "Efficiency" and watch what happens when you process your files. I rarely see mine drop below 90%, I've got the usable RAM in PS Prefs set to it's max suggested, cut way back on History and Cache.
Can't wait for NIK and others to offer their plugin in 64 bit, later this year is what I was told.
There used to be an old "rule of thumb" with old version of PS about Scratch disc size. I don't remember exactly but it may have been 3 to 5 times the size of your biggest file??
Good luck, Alan

Snow upgrade & raid sets?

I am just about ready to upgrade my system to snow and was wondering if anyone else uses the mirrored raid config for backup drives? My question is what will happen to the raid set when I upgrade the OS? Having to rebuild it is a major pain in the *** and takes forever! I've had to find that out the hard way and learned its actually quicker to just copy all the data to a temp drive - rebuild the raid set from scratch - and then just copy back over all the data. But even that can take a very long time too. So will snow honor any existing raid sets on external drives or would it just be better for me to use the built-in time machine backup system?

I see what you mean, but I don't use my backup drives as a cloned bootable. I have another user on my system and therefore have it setup without permissions. Too many file permission issues for the other user if I don't! So I just use it for saving photos, docs, and other items I don't want to lose. The thing I love about RAID is once you set one up, that's it! All the cloning or mirroring is done automatically to the extra drive. With most other backup software I've used, you have to usually schedule a backup time which doesn't always work if the Mac is asleep or if you are logged out before the set time. So with a RAID, at least I know every single time something new is saved, it is immediately copied at the same exact time to the other drive as well.
So I don't know what you mean by unreliable? Shouldn't that be the perfect job for any backup system? To immediately clone one drive to another without delay? But my original question was about whether or not upgrading the OS would honor or maintain existing RAID sets. Instead of having to rebuild them.

Intel xserve with hardware raid. Volume not mounting but drives show good

So this morning we came in and found that our intel xserve with the hardware raid is not booting.
Booted from OS X Install DVD and Raid Utility shows the Raidset good and all drives good.
Open disk utility and no volume form the raid will show up.
ANY IDEAS!??!

New information.
So out of the blue the Volume decided it needed to run an initializing run.
Apple care says I have to just wait until its done and see if the volume mounts.
Very strange since everything was green (good) until just then.
UPDATE:
Next day, the initializing has finished and now the Volume says (good) but the Raid Set is now "in transition". Applecare says I have to just wait till its done and see if the volume mounts.

Xsan with Raid and Xserve combined

Hi all,
I am setting up my first xsan and wonder if I can do the following with my kit.
Xserve with 3 x 1.5TB caddies (with Apple raid card in Raid 5)
Xserve with 3 x SAS 15k 300GB
Apple Raid with 7.5TB
Basically I want to use the Xserve with 4TB as the MDC but would love to be able to add the 4TB raid to the xsan so I have 11.5TB storage, is it possible to mix and match HD volumes on diff systems into the xsan??
If possible as well it would be great to add the SAS raid in as well for a super fast scratch area.
Any comments would be grand.

Nope. The Xsan volume must reside on storage that all the machines can see over Fibre Channel (SCSI protocol). You can't use storage internal to the servers themselves as part of the SAN volume.

G4 Mac OSX 10.4 server with RAID & sharepoints - Intel Xserve & RAID?

Hey all,
so we need to migrate our G4 Power Mac running Mac OSX 10.4 server with about 60 user accounts and a RAID with about 50 sharepoints to a brand new Intel Xserve with 10.4 server and a brand new RAID.
My plan for the server part of things is to put the new server online with the old one still running, make the new one a replica of the old one, then take the old one offline and promote the new one to a master.
But what to do about the sharepoints and several terabytes of data? Is there any way to do this except manually copying the data and re-creating all the sharepoints? That wouldn't be the complete end of the world as long as all the accounts/groups come across via the replication, but it'd be nice if there's a smart way to do this.
Thanks for your help!

Never tried the replica promote so I can't say that it will work. The way I migrated from 10.4 to new hardware 10.4 server was to set the new server up with exactly the same setup, DNS, IP and so on. This requires the old server be off the network for a bit. Once it was running I would have a backup of the LDAP/OD info made directly from the old server in Server Admin. Import this on the new server and all users and passwords are back in place. Now as for the share points and the data the best thing to do is to attach the old RAID to the new unit first. Hopefully you have a way to have both RAIDs connected at the same time to the new unit since that would be best.
In the interest of downtime you could immediately add the share points back in to WGM pointing to the old RAID drives. This gives you the free time to migrated the data when you want to. Make sure you know the right settings for each protocols which you use for each share point (AFP, SMB, FTP, NFS).
Now that your up and running you can move data by whatever means you see fit to the new RAID keeping in mind you want to keep permissions in-tacked. There are many clone or sync option out there and you don't need to move all the share points at once.
The main reason I chose this method is it offers a fall back and no client reconfiguring. If something is not working on the new server you can simply plug the old RAID back to the old server and your up. Second is that if you try to run both server at the same time you would need to create a whole new identity for the new server (IP, DNS and so on). Migrate data via a Network (very slow) and reconfigure all clients to point at the new server. I've done this at least 10+ times at different locations and even before the easy 10.4 backup of LDAP/OD info. Making sure you had a clean LDAP was never so easy. All swap outs took less then an hour of down time with maybe 2 hour pre-swap setup. Data movement to a new RAID was not always the case but by using this method you can move data later which is the most time consuming process of the whole swap.

Upgrading Xserve with RAID set

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