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I'm using a server with a HP Smart Array controller.

I have a hard drive that I wrote data to. I would like to install that disk in the server and use it.

Is it possible to create a logical drive from that physical drive? I see that all data is instantly lost once a logical drive is created or if the logical drive is reenabled. Is there a method to recover a partition in this case?

Thank you.

Florian
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3 Answers3

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No, this is not possible unless the original drive you wrote to was also connected to an HP Smart Array controller.

The HP Smart Array is a hardware RAID controller whose RAID metadata lives on the disks. In your case, you'll need to find another way to retrieve the data from your disk.

ewwhite
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A more elaborate answer would be "it depends". You might be able to simply "passthrough" that disk, and get access to the data on it. Whether that is possible depends on the actual RAID controller and how it implements passthrough.

In my case, I managed to do the following on an HP P410 RAID controller, using drives that actually had data on them (they were part of a dynamic volume pulled from a physical Windows machine):

  • create several RAID0 logical drives, each one with a single physical drive. This is actually a direct 1:1 mapping of physical to logical drives
  • pass through the logical drives to a Windows virtual machine (using vSphere RDMs).

In the end, I was able to see the original data in the Windows VM.

So yes, it might be done, but it might not be very easy :)

Bogd
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I was able to find a document in the HP support center.

What I attempted is called "hard drive roaming".

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=377836&docId=mmr_kc-0112214&docLocale=en_US

Florian
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