[MrFrank]

Sorry, I'm not an expert at this.

I have a 3-year old Dell E510 with two 160 gb hard drives, factory installed Raid 1 configuration. I have Windows XP.

For the last week, sometimes both drives come on, sometimes just one comes on and the configuration is Degraded. I can hear one of the drives (always the same one) trying several times to start, then stopping. It then boots pretty normally albeit slowly.

I have a new 250 gb drive still in the box, from the same manufacturer, Western Digital. They told me it replaces the 160.

Can I just pull the bad disk out and put the new one in, then start the computer so that the array rebuilds? Anything else I need to do? I know which disk is bad from the serial number of the normal drive shown at bootup.

Can somebody point me to a post that covers this if I missed it in the forum.

Thanks!

[MrFrank]

Help! Anyone got any ideas? This should be easy if you know how ;-)

[Hughv]

"How do I replace a failed drive?
If you introduce a new drive into the same slot where a bad drive was, the failback is
automatic (assuming that automatic rebuild is enabled on the system). In other words, a
new drive inserted into the same slot as a previously bad drive acts as a dedicated hot spare
for that array."
http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...ID/RAIDbk0.pdf

[MrFrank]

Excellent. That answers my question: yes, just pop in the new hard drive. It's rebuilding as we speak.

Thanks.

[MrFrank]

I solved my previous problem by installing a 250 gb drive as the mirror to a 160 gb. It worked fine. But is there a way to use the two used 160's that I have? When I installed an old used 160 on the computer with the original hard drive, it saw TWO arrays, one on each disk, and I wasn't sure what to do, so I just used the new 250 as the mirror. I know there's wasted space.

Could I have just deleted the array that I didn't want, through BIOs, and the one I wanted would have mirrored to there automatically?

If I keep the 250 and mirror to a new 250, will 250 become the usable size of my new hard drives?