Raid drive as independent disk

[wilkommen2]

Can an operating RAID 1 drive be removed from the array, and then mounted and read as an independent drive, either in an internal bay or an external enclosure? I ask because I am having trouble getting the array to recover after a head crash on one of the drives. It might be simpler overall if I could read the good drive, extract its contents, then restore to a newly-formatted empty array.

[Rootstonian]

You should be able replace the bad drive and the array should rebuild; not sure if you have to manually rebuild or if it is automatic.

Let me know, becuase I just setup a RAID 1 on 2 320 gig drives.

[wilkommen2]

Roots,

The array appeared to rebuild, but sat there forever - 10hrs + for 500GB. This is a Buffalo Tech Drive Station DUO. I have a query into them for clarification. What I wanted to know though, is if a RAID1 drive can be read outside of its array - I'm hoping it can, since it's a full mirror. The only thing that makes me wonder is that at least some server arrays remember which slot the drive was in, and will complain if you put drive 2 back in slot 1. This leads me to believe there is some RAID-specific data on the drive, which might render it unreadable in an independent drive slot.

I've already recovered from my head crash, so this is for future reference - it might not be possible to do a backup when my drive starts filling up, so if the array won;t rebuild itself, I would be looking to remount the drive, then copy from there to a new, blank array.

[Rootstonian]

Guess I could bite the bullet and power down my pc and unplug one of the drives...gulp!! ROFL