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

I've had 160MB Hd's Sync in 1.5 hrs
Something must be wrong if it's 2 days.

--
Russ Grover
Small Business IT Support
Portland\Beaverton OR USA
Email: Sales at SmallBusinessITSupport.com
Website: www.SmallBusinessITSupport.com


"Tom" <tschwoegler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:qODAe.760$Ih7.266@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>I faced a similar problem with a dual IDE system windows NT server. The
> remirroring took all the system resources and was insanely SLOW. I
> convinced
> the client to switch to SCSI drives, the drives resynched in 19 minutes.
> My
> calcualtions for the IDE re-sync was about 2 days based on the progress I
> witnessed for about an hour. The explaination I got was that with SCSI
> drive, the controller takes the hit not the processor. That may or may not
> be the exact answer, but it seemed to fit the problem. I have never
> recommended IDE drives for a server before or since. When I use SATA
> drives,
> I pay the extra money for a raid controller.
>
> Tom
>
>
> "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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