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I have an older system using an LSI (now Broadcom) 9690SA-8I, on a motherboard that's failing, can't have more RAM and is inadequate.

I thought I was so cool getting a new AMD Threadripper system ... however, the motherboard does not recognize - nor boot :-( - with the card. I also have an LSI MegaRaid 9271-8i. I think LSI bought 3ware at some point, but their Bioses and management software are really different. Nevertheless, I tried it in the Threadripper system and it boots properly. If I attach the 8 drives to the system, the card even recognizes the drives. But I can't find a way to migrate the RAID 6 setup to the new card.

Is there a way to do this? I really can't afford to lose the data. I've completely blown my budget with the new Motherboard, CPU and RAM, so buying 8 New disks , cases and cables is really beyond my means. Then there's the whole reconfigure the server like the old one ..

Would appreciate any insight

Jacques Amar
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  • It’s simple: Make sure your backup is up to date and then follow Wombles answer: Delete, migrate and restore from the backup. If you don’t have a backup, you are obviously willing to loose the data anyway, as having a RAID is in no way a replacement for a backup. – Sven Jul 26 '18 at 06:57
  • The question was "Is there a way?" The answer is "No". Manual move is necessary. – Jacques Amar Aug 02 '18 at 05:46

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The solution is to copy all the data off the RAID set whilst it's connected to the old controller, then plug the drives into the new controller and create a new RAID set, then copy the data back. The chances that the new controller will understand the RAID metadata already on the old disks is... slim.

womble
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  • Yes, i guessed. But since it was .. at some point .. the same company, I was hoping there is a BIOS compatibility. Some answers here suggest that cards of the same manufacturer can read the RAID config. – Jacques Amar Jul 26 '18 at 05:53
  • This solution requires the purchase (or availability) of an equivalent amount of storage - which is not going to happen this century as I stated in the OP. I do know how to manually migrate. – Jacques Amar Jul 26 '18 at 05:58
  • In most cases, I wouldn’t even bother to have a new hardware RAID controller. Just restore to a software RAID and never have this problem again. – Sven Jul 26 '18 at 07:00
  • @JacquesAmar Oh, and while this might be all the same company now, LSI and 3ware used to be different, competing companies and these product lines are *not* compatible. – Sven Jul 26 '18 at 07:03
  • There is absolutely no guarantee that even similar products from the same company will have compatible RAID metadata formats. If that is important to you, you need to do that research on the specific model(s) of RAID controller you are interested in. – womble Jul 27 '18 at 00:09
  • Yes. All true. Again, the goal was to be cheap and save time if feasible. Otherwise, had to bite the bullet and get new disks, Fortunately, new affordable disks have 4 times more space than older ones they replace, so only need a couple for backup. Not as bad as I thought, considering. – Jacques Amar Aug 02 '18 at 05:42