Re: Worst monday of my life - please help...

I was going to say that it appeared to me that all was well with the new
install to new HD, except for SQL. If that's the case, restoring the SQL
data from the old HD should fix it, but you'd need a SQL guru for the
commands and that's not me.


"Russ Grover" <russ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:O64RJJnhFHA.3912@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Well that was a ton of stuff to read.
> So from what I can tell (Correct me if I'm wrong)
> Is that you are Running Non mirrored NOW because its broke.
> And you want to know what to do next?
>
> It almost sounds like Restore the mirrors
> And restore from your backup (Assuming you have one that is good)
> Is there something I missed?
>
> And Restoring from backups DO work (As many of us can attest.)
>
> Also If your mirror was broke did you see anything in logs to indicate
> why?
>
> --
> Russ Grover
> Small Business IT Support
> Portland\Beaverton OR USA
> Email: Sales at SmallBusinessITSupport.com
> Website: www.SmallBusinessITSupport.com
>
>
> "Benman" <bmannino@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:1121107000.462773.294520@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Greetings all,
>>
>> Where do I begin? Well, from the beginning I guess...
>>
>> I have a customer who had a Windows 2000 Small Business Server running
>> on a pair of mirrored 120 GB hard drives. They wanted many of the
>> features available in Windows 2003 SBS, so we purchased the upgrade,
>> and I penciled it in for this past weekend.
>>
>> It started out painful and hasn't eased up since. To try and shorten
>> the story here, I had to do all kinds of patching before it would even
>> accept the upgrade, but it finally did install with a few hiccups.
>>
>> After completing the installation, the server was running extremely
>> slow (sat night). The CPU usage was showing 50+% and the hard drive
>> was chugging away, but I could not figure out what was going on. The
>> System Idle Process was in the 90% range which didnt seem abnormal to
>> me.
>>
>> I decided to call it a night on saturday, and I shut the server down
>> (mistake #1). Sunday rolled around, and I decided to break down and
>> buy a new hard drive to do a clean install and then migrate the data,
>> or just leave the mirrored drives in the server on the secondary IDE
>> port. The SBS 2003 clean install went in like a dream and the machine
>> was flying. The only reason I avoided the clean install in the first
>> place was because they are using a proprietary application that uses
>> SQL Server on the back end and I didnt really want to mess around with
>> moving data around.
>>
>> Anyhow, I decided it was time to re-add the mirror. I first booted the
>> machine one more time to take a look at the disk admin settings to see
>> if there was anything special I would need to do. I contemplated
>> breaking the mirror first, but was afraid to so for fear of losing any
>> data. I did have a USB backup, but at 60GB, it would take so long to
>> restore and I didnt want to take the chance. Then in disk admin, I saw
>> the reason for the slowdown - the mirror set showed "Resynchronizing".
>> I couldnt understand why it was resynchronizing when I never broke the
>> mirror. After over an hour it was only 2% complete and at that rate, I
>> would never get this done. So I shut down and reconnected the hard
>> drive with new install and put these two drives to the secondary IDE
>> port. Upon reboot I got a strange error regarding the fault tolerance
>> failing. After my heart started beating again, I ran disk admin and
>> saw that both drives said "Failed" with red Xs next to the Drive
>> numbers. Thinking I had just lost everything - I panicked. I shut
>> down, unlugged the slave drive on the secondary port (I assume this is
>> the "shadow" drive of the mirror) and made it the primary master by
>> itself. It started to load windows, but then it would just reboot
>> continually. I tried safe mode with no luck - same thing.
>>
>> Next I reconnected the original fresh install drive as the primary
>> master, and connected this part of the mirror as the primary master.
>> In disk admin, it showed the 2nd drive of the mirror as "missing" and
>> both still read "Failed". I right click on the drive and said remove
>> mirror again, but it gave me some kind of error saying to look at the
>> event log. I was able however to choose "Repair Volume" and assigned
>> it the drive letter S. All data was then accessible from this drive.
>>
>> Whew, bear with me - almost done.
>>
>> This was late last night, so I ended up mapping the shares to this S
>> drive. I also reinstalled SQL Server 2000 on the new C drive and
>> restored the databases. It looked like I was home free, but then when
>> I tried using the proprietary program mentioned earlier, I was getting
>> some stange SQL errors. My only guess here is that something must not
>> have gotten backed up/restored properly. The .bak files seemed OK, and
>> the restore procedure didnt produce any errors, but who knows...
>>
>> I would love to hear any suggestions on how to dig out of this hole.
>> My thinking was to try and get one of the original mirror disks back up
>> and running as a standalone drive. Im hoping this would have all the
>> original Windows 2003 SBS and SQL 2K settings, and without the mirror
>> in place, it should speed up considerably.
>>
>> It refuses to boot completely, and Im not sure exactly how to proceed
>> here. I was thinking of putting the SBS 2003 CD #1 in the drive and
>> booting to it with the the master drive of the mirror as the only
>> connected drive. Then I could choose repair/reinstall.
>> Or should I attempt to repair the mirror?
>>
>> Or do I attempt to copy the SQL Server 2000 folder structure from the
>> recovered mirror drive to the new drive? I'm assuming there are other
>> system files or registry entries that may keep this from working
>> properly. The folder structure is nearly identical right now, and the
>> "shells" for both databases are in place.
>>
>> I am able to see all the contents of the master mirror drive, and I
>> have the slave of the mirror socked away right now.
>>
>> Any thoughts or pointers to resources would be immensely appreciated
>> right now. Thank you in advance.
>>
>
>


.

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