Re: Catastrophic Corruption of Dynamic Disks
- From: "Will" <westes-usc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:43:08 -0800
In attempting to recover the boot device from our failure of dynamic disks,
we did these steps:
1) Converted the boot volume from Dynamic to Simple using DSKPROBE from
inside ERD Commander 2005.
2) Made the Simple partition Active, probably from Disk Management in ERD
Commander 2005.
3) Ran chkdsk /r from the Windows 2003 recovery console.
4) Ran Fixboot from recovery console
5) Ran FixMBR from recovery console
In spite of all of these steps, any attempt to boot the from the system
volume gets:
"Error Loading Operating System"
I normally associate that message with a BIOS configuration problem or a
hard drive cylinder mapping issue. I am not finding the problem in our
case. Can someone give me more detail about this error and how to overcome
it?
Would an incorrect disk number inside of BOOT.INI ever cause this error?
--
Will
"Will" <westes-usc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:qZCdnVi46_lsWi7anZ2dnUVZ_rCtnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I had a really disappointing event take place today with a critical system
that runs Windows 2003 32-bit. Effectively *all* of the dynamic disk
structures were corrupted, even though we were not working on them at the
time of the reboot. Upon reboot the system gives some brief message
about the disk being corrupt, and the Windows 2003 boot sequence never
starts. Looking at all of the drives inside the Disk Management utility in
Microsoft's ERD Commander Boot CD, the Dynamic volumes show in the state
"Offline". A Google search seems to suggest that Dynamic volumes in an
offline state normally means the Dynamic volume information is corrupt and
cannot be loaded.
What is particularly horrifying to me is we have two separate hardware
RAID controllers with three and five volumes respectively, and then we had
mirrored drives across those different controllers using Windows 2003
mirroring. When we rebooted, the corruption of the Dynamic volume
information resulted in ALL EIGHT drives effectively disappearing and
going "offline". So while the benefit of Dynamic volumes carrying around
information about other volumes on each volume has its advantages, the
downside of this system now becomes very clear to me. If you hit on any
bug that writes the Dynamic volume information incorrectly, you are going
to lose EVERYTHING on that system that is Dynamic!
We are in the process of recovering by hacking volume structures to
convert the Dynamic back to Simple volumes, and that so far seems to be
going the right direction.
Can someone explain to me under what scenarios this kind of dramatic
corruption of Dynamic volume structures can take place? If I have a
loose end in my hardware, I need to know what possibilities to chase. I
didn't have a good backup of this system since it was just being built up,
and losing it would have been a complete catastrophe.
--
Will
.
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