Restore to software mirror? Story
- From: E. Palmer <EPalmer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 10:19:30 -0800
Hi,
I had a rough night the other night due to complications from a needed
restore, even after I thought I had good cold images.
Prior to attempting an upgrade from CRM 1.2 to 3.0 I shut the SBS 2003
Premium box down and made ghosts of the system and data drives.
Unfortunatley I did them a little wrong. First I made a drive to drive ghost
of the system (18gb) to a larger (160gb), then I thought, shucks theres all
that space, I'll ghost image the Data (50gb) drive to the same 160gb drive
and proceeded to do so. Nice.
Then I attempted the upgrade, which ended in failure later in the morning
(about 2-3am). I tried several tricks to try to get it to work, including
uninstalling 3.0 and re-installing it, but though the first attempt showed
all green on the precheck, the second did not, and even though the first
attempt said it failed and the second showed success, it was not.
So as I contemplate the restore I realize my boo boo on the ghosts. I
cannot ghost back the system because it is now 65gb because I added the data
image files, oops. Now I have other backups, including Live State Recovery
and SBS, but I always prefer the ghosts, also, the last three nights of SBS
failed due to low disk space, and the LSR stuff missed work done on Saturday.
My other foolish move was to try this on a Sunday night. In order for me to
get the ghost images back I would have to pull off the 50gb data image files
and then delete them so I can do the system ghost back.
CRM was down and out for the Monday morning shift. Luckily CRM is not
mission critical for this crew so they whined and suffered though Monday.
The CRM client contact information is in their Outlook Contacts.
Monday day I was able to take the ghosty drive home and with Symantec
Recovery I extracted the 50gb of data gho files off to another drive and then
delete them from the 160gb system ghost (whew). Monday night I started out
OK by ghosting back the system to the hardware mirror 18gb twin scsi u320's.
Nice. Then I made another boo-boo. The data drives are twin 73gb scsi u320
Windows Software Mirrored (I found out after buying the hardware mirror card
that it only did one mirror) and I made the mistake of thinking that it would
be best to disconnect one of them so that the OS would not be "confused" as
to which was the recovered drive and which was the CRM failed upgrade drive.
OK, proceed with ghost, upon reboot several thing are goofed, drive letters
are changed, mirror is messed up, even after resetting drive letters and
rebuilding the mirror, the system is wonked and CRM 1.2 is busted.
Now I try other tricks, I try a LSR recovery from Friday night to both
system and data, I end up with NTLDR not found, probably due to not removing
the backup ghost (even though I had deleted the NTLDR file on the backup so
that it would not boot ahead of the SCSI System. After a couple attempts
including a repair of the OS from CD to get the NTLDR back (which did not
work after I restored the system after that with and LSR file), another
system restore from system ghost image files I had also created that day,
(they did not work until I set the "Image Boot" switch). By the morning I
had the box, including CRM 1.2, mostly back with the system from the Sunday
morning ghost and data from the Friday night LSR recovery. I then had to fix
the exchange store which would not mount until I moved the Sunday store over
to the messed up but rebuilt Friday night software mirror. Then I had to
delete all the client OST files, then I had to uninstall/reinstall the CRM
email router. So I'm rambling here, but I'll finish with a couple
observations and questions.
What is the proceedure for restoring a cold image to a Windows Software
Mirror? I'm darn sure it Is Not to restore to one drive and hope the OS can
rebuild the mirror. I am pretty sure it is to actually make Two ghosts in
order to restore to Both drives, which is double the work and time. I also
found out that my hardware mirror only works at scsi narrow before the OS.
It was taking 40 minutes for the 15gb system ghost restore (300mb/s) and 20
minutes for the 50gb data restore (at 2000mb/s) Afer a few of those it
starts to get early in the morning.
So now I am going to do a few things. I am going to read up on LSR because
I could have done alot of this faster and easier if I had only used the newer
proceedures rather than my old cold image ideas. I am going to shop for a
hardware raid card that support two mirror pairs (sys and data) and runs at
full speed before the OS. That way cold images would be fast and easy.
If I do use ghost, I am going to make ghost Images rather than drive to
drive copies so I can move the files around if I need to, and especially to
reduce the risk of corrupting boot sectors on existing system drives. That
just killed me.
I am going to review all my backup scheduling and make sure I have all
things covered seven ways from Friday. I am going to leave tons of free
space on my backup drives.
I am NEVER going to attempt an upgrade on a Sunday night, even thought this
should have worked. This is a very small and minimally customized CRM rig.
I am going to read over every freakin line of those long boring guides and
follow them to the letter. Even though I am pretty sure I actually did that.
Thanks for listening,
.
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