Re: Both sides of Mirrored Drives showing as separate drives

Have you tried contacting Dell? Hopefully you still have a service contract
on at least one of them.

As to your last comment regarding the hardware RAID, I don't believe that
this is true. You can't change it from the OS, but you *can* change it
during system boot. Watch the messages roll by and when you see the message
about the PERC adapter, press Ctrl-M and you should be put into the BIOS
setup for the adapter. If you have more than one, make sure you are
operating on the right one. You should be able to delete/recreate the mirror
as you wish.


WARNING.... Check before you do this. I'm not sure, but you may lose the
data if you break/recreate the RAID array.....

--
Regards,
Hank Arnold

"Jim Watts" <j.watts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uhTC8BSkFHA.3936@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Hi,
>
> I have a number of servers, all based on DELL hardware, that are showing a
> very odd problem with their disk subsystem.
>
> Basically, these servers have the OS on Mirrored/RAID1 disks, and BOTH
> disks are showing in My Computer/Explorer. For example, one server shows
> C: and F: both pointing to the same disk (same files, freespace, label
> etc). Looking at the Disk Management MMC, it correctly shows the mirror,
> shows that both halfs have C: as the drive letter, and actually shows only
> the single drives in the top half of the Windows, rather than the two
> duplicate drives the My Computer shows.
>
> To make matters worse, we appear to have seen at least one of these
> servers reboot and start up with the %SystemDrive% set to the other half
> of the mirror, F: instead of C:. This obviously causes all sorts of
> problems. A reboot fixed the problem, and from there it actually looks
> like they swap which drive is considered the systemdrive on each reboot.
>
> As i said, these servers are all DELL servers, but there are differences.
> Some use software mirroring, some use hardware mirroring via DELL PERC3/DI
> RAID controllers. The only consistent thing (at the moment) is that all
> the servers showing this problem are running Windows2000 Server SP4. Has
> anybody else seen this, and know what to do to fix it? Could it have been
> causd by a recent update, as these servers have certainly run correctly in
> the past. I cant beleive that this is something that can be fixed by
> breaking and redoing the mirrors as, as i said, some of these use hardware
> RAID and so you dont even get the option to do this!
>
> Many thanks for you help,
> Jim Watts
>
> --
> Jim Watts,
> Technology Consultant
> Information Systems Services
> University of Southampton
>
>


.

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