How to determine which drive belongs to which slot on raid 5

hphp-prolianthp-smart-arrayraid5

i have an HP DL380 G8 machine with 4 hard drives of same size and running on raid 5. unfortunately during a service process of our data center one of the junior team members pulled out all four hard drives without labeling the actual sequence.

now i have following questions in mind:

  1. can the raid controller automatically determine the actual sequence and rebuild the array without any data loss.
  2. if not, is there any way to determine the actual order of hard drives

i cannot afford to loose the data on my drives. Can anybody suggest some authentic way out of this situation.

Thanks

Best Answer

The drive configuration and RAID metadata in HP servers is stored on the disks, not the controller.

For a simple server with one RAID controller, and one drive cage and only 4 bays, you should be able to insert the disks in any order.

On the new system, power on... Pay very close attention to the BIOS messages. You are looking for the 1724 POST code during the array configuration BIOS screen. You want to see:

1724-Slot X Drive Array - Physical Drive Position Change(s) Detected

That means that the controller detected the position change successfully.

If you see a Not Configured POST message, power the system down immediately to avoid data loss, and then try another drive arrangement. This is unlikely to happen, though.

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