All,

I have a Dell PE 1950 w/ 2 SATA drives in a software RAID1. OS is CentOS 5.5 (2.6.18.x). Starting this afternoon we received HW errors (something on the bus is bad, E171F) and the machine became unresponsive. We hard booted and it came back up for about 5 hours but then it happened again.

I'm trying to figure out our options. Unfortunately we do not have similar hardware but I have a small desktop that I can use. I was contemplating putting one of the drives into the desktop and then starting it up. My goal was to then P2V it using Vmware converter but apparently the free v5.x doesn't support hot cloning/converting on a RAID volume, only the Enterprise 4.x version of Converter does.

My questions are:

1.) Is putting a single drive out of a RAID1 pair into another piece of HW is safe? Based on my research and understanding it appears to be but would like confirmation. 2.) Is there any work around to the Vmware Converter not supporting RAID volumes during a hot clone/convert session? 3.) Are there other options I'm overlooking?

Thanks in advance for reading and responding.

--Choi S.