Question
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Topic
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Raid 5 repair in Windows Server 2003
LockedOne of the four drives in my Raid-5 array was not working and needed replacement. All four drives are identical Seagate 500Gb drives. In the Disk Management Console, Disk 4 was listed as “Missing” and the rest of the array is in “Failed Redundancy”. I tried to “reactivate” multiple times and the drive was confirmed dead.
So, yesterday I found the Serial number of the missing drive under Device Manager (by elimination, that is), and took out the old drive. I powered it back up and Disk 4 is still missing, just to confirm that I have pulled the right one.
I powered down the server again and put in the new drive in identical hardware configuration as before.
The server started up and recognized my new drive, asked me to format it as a “Simple” volume. As it finished, it was already a Dynamic volume (to my surprise, I thought I had to convert it). And now the new drive shows up as a separate Simple volume by itself.
Following Microsoft’s TechNet note, I right clicked on the Raid-5 Volume and tried to click on “Repair Volume”, but that option is greyed out. I know for sure that the replacement drive is 100% identical to the old drive, it was bought in a batch, same model. In the Disk Management console, I can still see four drives in the Raid-5 array with one “missing”, and the new drive as a separate drive.
What am I missing? How do I “move” this drive into the Raid-5 array, instead of it being a separate individual drive and let it “Repair”?
This array was setup using Windows Server 2003 with SP2, software Raid. It’s mostly a file server and I can deal with the slower speed.
Thank you very much.