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

Oops that was GB sorry Typo

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


"Russ Grover" <russ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OsYmionhFHA.1372@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 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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