From: "Geo" 

"Antti Kurenniemi"  wrote in
message news:4479dba3$1{at}w3.nls.net...

> I've got my first almost real server. It's running W2k3 server, and has
two
> SATA disks which are configured as a RAID 1 mirror by the OS - no
additional
> controller software or nothing. Works fine, but I was wondering how I'll
be
> able to tell if one disk goes down? I suppose I could test it by yanking
the
> plug on one of the drives, but will that break the drive? The box is not
yet
> running anything too important, but it will have a lot of documents and
> backups and stuff like that, so I'd rather make sure it really survives a
> disk crasch before it's fully operational.

Piece of cake Antti, shut the machine down, unplug the sata cable from one
drive and reboot the machine. If you unplug the primary drive it should
probably fail to boot because you will need a boot floppy to force it to
boot from the mirror drive. Once you do that you can log in and break the
mirror set, shut the machine down, plug the drive back in, reboot the
machine and recreate the mirror.

Since you are unplugging the primary drive, that will work as your backup
just in case.. (I would also have a tape backup but you should be ok this
way).

Geo.

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