Re: SBS 2003 + SATA + failing software mirror

Hi Charlie...have you actually tried this with SATA drives ?

On my SCSI test rig everything works as you would expect..with SATA I'm getting conflicting issues.

OK, I'm booted back to the boot floppy.

2nd SATA in port 2 now showing as disk 0 parts C:\, E:\, F:\

1st (primary/failed/disconnected) SATA showing as missing - failed redundancy.

Remove mirroring, am just left with 2nd SATA three healthy simple volumes.

Shut down.

2nd SATA in port 2 is the drive that the boot floppy has started ( the mirror shadow)

1st (new) SATA drive is now connected in port 1

Edit the boot.ini on the floppy to now point to multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)

System booted up

1st SATA drive is now disk 0 unallocated space

2nd SATA drive, three healthy simple volumes, is now disk 1 ( as it was originally) though the drive letters appear to have changed to C:\, H:\ and I ?

What next ?

Do I need to convert the 1st SATA to dynamic ? or create partitions and mark as active first ?




"Charlie Russel - MVP" <charlie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:eHgr2LMeJHA.5540@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
If this is a software RAID, that is normal behaviour. If you look at boot.ini, you'll see something like:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003 for Small Business Server" /noexecute=optout /fastdetect

If you have a boot floppy, it would point to a different rdisk or rdisk, reflecting the other half of the mirror.

You need to break the mirror, edit the boot.ini on the good drive to point to the same as the boot.ini on the boot floppy. Then, when you add the new disk, you can recreate the mirror. Once it's rebuilt, you have the option of changing back to have the original be the new primary, or leave it as is. If you leave it, make sure you change your boot floppy to point to the original primary.

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/xperts64
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel

"Jim" <jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:gkt011$18gi$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
OK, seeing as there doesn't appear to be much activity in the other forums I wonder if there are any hardware guru's over here..

SBS 2003 in a small five user network.

Installed onto a small HP server with two 250GB SATA drives software RAID 1 mirrored.

The primary SATA drive is failing and needs replacing.

If I shut the system down and remove the primary SATA drive the system will not boot to the secondary mirror shadow drive.
System just goes into a boot loop, doesn't even show the startup menu.

If I plug the primary back in all is fine and it will boot up...but it needs changing...

If I get a USB floppy drive and connect to the system and use a boot floppy I can get the startup menu and can get the secondary shadow to boot on it's own.

I thought that I should be able to get the secondary SATA drive to boot without the primary being there without having to resort to a boot floppy ?

OK, after a little experiment I discover that this may just be a SATA peculiarity as if I knock together a SCSI based system with the same config I find that I can indeed just remove the primary drive and the system still starts up seamlessly with only the secondary shadow SCSI attached. I thought so..

Why am I getting different results on SCSI compared to SATA ?

Is this a SATA issue ?

Any takers ?



.

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