We previously wrote about some RAID rebuilding issues we were having and that the way around it was to reboot your computer into the OS X Installer disks, open up Terminal and enter in a string of commands.
Fortunately Apple has fixed an issue within the Disk Utility application that allows it to work as intended. Now you can simply drag new disks into a RAID set and click on the Rebuild button and it’ll work properly!
I just tried it out this weekend and it successfully rebuilt a degraded mirror RAID set!
August 21st, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Thanks for the update. To clarify, was the RAID set you rebuilt being used as the startup disk? I have a server with a degraded RAID that I need to rebuild, but trying to find the time to reboot off the install disk to do the rebuild is tough as it’s our OD Master.
TIA
- Scott
August 27th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Hi,
Yes the RAID set I was rebuilding was being used as the startup disk. I’ve also done them on non-startup disks as well. I definitely understanding finding that window of time to rebuild them.
Fortunately Apple seems to have fixed Disk Utility so you no longer need to go and reboot your machine with the Installer disk. Just open up Disk Utility and add a new disk to the RAID set and it should automatically start rebuilding in the background (so long as you had the automatically rebuild in background button checked).
Now obviously there’s going to be a decrease in performance but you won’t have downtime. My 500GB set took about 8-9 hours to rebuild.