A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ MD1000 SAS SOLUTIONS  VER A00 
PAGE 22    5/06/2005 
The following procedure describes how to migrate the physical disks from one controller to another: 
1.  Shut down the system from which the physical disks are being moved. 
2.  Shut down the server of the receiving controller if it does not have a preexisting virtual disk 
configuration. 
3.  Place the physical disks into the new enclosure. 
4.  Start up the system connected to the receiving controller. 
5.  Use Server Administrator’s Import Foreign Configuration wizard to import the migrated virtual 
disks on the receiving controller. 
Importing Migrated Virtual Disks  
After migrating the physical disks, Server Administrator enables you to import the virtual disks or 
“foreign” configuration that reside on the relocated physical disks. 
To be imported, the foreign configuration must contain a virtual disk that is in either “Ready” or 
“Degraded” state. For proper completion of this task, all of the virtual disk data must be present. If 
the virtual disk is using a redundant RAID level, the additional redundant data does not need to be 
present. For example, if the foreign configuration contains one side of a mirror in a RAID 1 virtual 
disk, then the virtual disk is in a degraded state and can be imported. On the other hand, if the 
foreign configuration contains only one physical disk that was originally configured as a RAID 5 
using three physical disks, then the RAID 5 virtual disk cannot be imported. 
In addition to the virtual disks, a foreign configuration may consist of a physical disk that was 
assigned as a hot spare on one controller and then moved to another controller. The Import 
Foreign Configuration wizard imports the new physical disk as a hot spare. If the physical disk was 
a dedicated hot spare on the previous controller, but the virtual disk to which the hot spare was 
assigned is no longer present in the foreign configuration, then the physical disk is imported as a 
global hot spare. 
If a physical disk contains all or some portion of a foreign configuration, then Server Administrator 
displays the physical disk state as “Foreign.”