RAID Question

[vwgtiturbo]

Hello there. This isn't a Linux question for the most part, but since Linux gurus are more knowledgeable, I figured I had a decent shot at an answer.
I have a Suse server running a Highpoint 2320 8 channel RAID card. I had four drives connected in a 1/0 setup (data was striped across two drives, then those two were mirrored to the other two). I bought new drives to upgrade these, and removed these four from the system. I have found that I cannot use them in another computer. If I connect them, the BIOS never sees the drive. I assumed it had something to do with being used in a RAID setup, so I reconnected the original four to the RAID card, deleted the array, then changed their status from "Initialized" to "Spare". Still, after removing the drives from the RAID card, I cannot use them in another computer. I have tried three other computers, and none will even detect that a drive is connected. Am I missing some fundamental step? The drives are not bad, as I ran a full backup onto them the day before disconnecting them, but I cannot for the life of me, figure out what I am doing wrong. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[tuxette]

I think most RAID controllers write their own proprietary meta data on the drives when RAID is set up. You may have to reinitialize the drives on a new RAID controller or try a low level format to wipe the metadata off if you don't want to use RAID anymore.

[vwgtiturbo]

That sounds about right, but how would I go about doing a low-level format if the BIOS (much less, an operating system) can't detect the drives?

[tuxette]

How about putting them back in the RAID controller and configuring all four as individual drives? Maybe that will reset the metadata and then the drives would be visible when transfered to a non RAID system.

[vwgtiturbo]

Thanks so much for the suggestions. I have been fighting this for days, trying to do it on my own (because really, isn't it annoying when someone doesn't even TRY to fix something before crying for help?).
I tried to do this, but there is no option to do it. There are only options to Add/Delete/Verify Array, and one to change the drive from 'Initialized' to 'Spare'. I did delete the array, and changed the drives to Spare, but none of my other computers could see the drives. I tried it on my Suse machine, an Ubuntu install, and an Ubuntu LiveCD. Obviously, this was before I realized that not even the systems' BIOSes were seeing the drives...
However, I did finally get this to work (get ready to bash me). The one computer I didn't try these drives on was my Macbook (no, I am not an elitist Mac user ). Seriously... I hooked them up, and of course they didn't show on my desktop, but they DID show in the System Profiler (hell, they didn't even show in dmesg, or my console). After I saw that, I opened up Disk Utility, and there the drive was. DU told me that the drive could not be read by this computer, and asked if I wanted to initialize them. Why, yes I do! After that, I was able to format them. So, my five day struggle to get these damn things came down to the computer I use all day, every day, but never thought to get involved.
Thanks again for the suggestions. I appreciate the time spent, because really, I was at wits end, getting ready to just chuck these drives and chalk it up as a loss (I mean, you only have so much time in a day to mess with things like this). Take care!

[peter]

So you hooked it up with USB and everything was alright? It's strange that it didn't show up on the desktop.

[vwgtiturbo]

Yeah, that's what I thought. I was totally floored, seeing that dmesg on my Linux boxes didn't show any messages when I connected them via either the SATA bus, or through the USB converter. I would have expected that maybe they would have shown in dmesg when I connected them, and then I wouldn't have been able to read them. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that even the different computer BIOSes couldn't detect the drives (which makes it even more odd that the MB could even see the drives). I have no idea what kind of quirkiness I was dealing with, but luckily the drives are formatted and happy now.