How to image a raid5 array?

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Modey, Apr 7, 2006.

  1. Modey

    Modey Terabyte Poster

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    Hey all, not sure if this is the right area for this request or not, but here goes.

    We have an IBM Eserver Xseries 235 at work that has a 5 disk hardware raid5 array (ServerRaid 6i+ controller).

    We'd like to take an image of the server but having googled etc.. it would seem that it's not always possible on raid5 arrays.

    Anyone tried this before? Any recommendations on software to try? We have tried ghost8 corporate but it doesn't recognise the array at all.
     
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  2. simongrahamuk
    Honorary Member

    simongrahamuk Hmmmmmmm?

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    I think that Symantec has recently released a product for this very thing. Its called Symantec LiveState Recovery Standard Server, and is supposed to take a complete image of your server.

    I've never tried it though. :blink
     
  3. Jellyman_4eva

    Jellyman_4eva Byte Poster

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    As this seems to be a production server, and I have little experience of such things, I would wait for someone with superior experience to mine before trying this...!

    As it is a hardware based raid, it would present itself to the OS as a single drive correct?

    If thats the case, why not boot to a linux cd with drivers for the SCSI card, and then run a dd command to copy the entire system drive to somewhere else (Like another network server)..

    Something like this:

    http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Dd#Creating_a_hard_drive_backup_image

    Where your drive in question will be sda rather than hda etc etc

    In particular this:

     
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  4. Modey

    Modey Terabyte Poster

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    Thanks for the suggestions guys, will look into that program Simon. I have no experience of Linix Jelly, so I don't know if I'd want to go down that route. Thanks for the suggestion though.
     
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  5. Modey

    Modey Terabyte Poster

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    Just had a look at the details of the Livestate recovery app from Symantec. Looks very impressive, I'll be downloading the trial when I'm back at work and having a try. If it can do half of what it claims then it will be very useful indeed.
     
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