Re: Help with Reinstalling...

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Hi Larry, thanks for the reply, I clearly didn't explain this very well...

The server had 4 disks in it. 2 were software raid 1 with a boot partition
and the other partion has exchange log files on it. One of these drives
failed. I took it out, broke mirror, replace disk set up new mirror etc...
after all was said and done, it would not boot from the new disk that was the
secondary plex. Tried floppies with boot.ini etc, nothing worked. That was
quite a while back, so I dont' remember exact error messages etc.

So I just took the software mirror off and left it.

The other two disk in the machien are on an adaptec hardware raid 0 setup.
They hold the exchange MDB directory and are fine. ... well mostly fine
anyway, the monitoring program doesn't work due to some driver problem or
another... but it works. This will be resolved later when I resolve the
boot disk problems.

I now have a new adaptec raid controller which has proper SBS support and
supports 4 disks. I purchased another physical disk to match the disk that
wasn't booting the secondary plex above... so I have two blank disks to put
on the RAID controller as my boot drive and they are configred as a RAID 1
container....

Now to get the single boot drive that is dynamic disk cloned (more or
less...) onto the new RAID 1 container... that's what I can't do, no cloning
programs will do it... The adaptec driver has been added, so if I could
clone, it would probably find it and install as the card will install an bios
int13 handler... but I don't think that I'm going to get it cloned.

So the MDB directory of exchange is over on a working RAID that will stay
put during any rebuilding. I have backups, but not an ASR backupu, I can't
seem to get that to work. As stated, there are only 3 real users and a
couple of file shares, so even system state doesn't seem all that important
to me, I don't mind recreating the shares and recreating the users and
re-applying security to it all.. won't take more than half an hour to do all
that.

The mail is what bothers me. I have never had an exchange server crash on
me... lucky or something I guess, so I have never restored an exchagne backup
(I have both backup exec 10d exchange client and ntbackup exchange backups)
but if I hvae the MDB directory of exchange and I rebuild and get exchange
setup, is there someway I can just slot it in? what about logs? My logs are
on the current single boot drive 2nd partition... will I need those? is
there anything else of out exchange that I might need? As I am going to
build this onto the new RAID, I will at all times have the orignal C:\ boot
drive but!!!! it's dynamic... so what does that mean, will I be able to
read it ever again if I take it out and put it in say an external enclusure?
If I take it out and all goes wrong, can I put it back in as my C:\ boot
drive? This dynamic disk this is really leaving a bad taste in the mouth you
know!

Any and all help on this rambling email problem is hugely appreciated. I
just really don't want to find myself completed screwed. I'm not sure why I
can't do an ASR either, the NT backup program doen't seem happy to do one
says it can't find the right tape, stuff.. which may be related to the fact
that I've loaded Backup Exec... but I have loaded the windows driver for the
backup device.

A thought, could I do an ASR to a USB attached drive? and then restore that
to the Adaptect RAID1 and then bring it up in a safe or some mode with
minimal drivers andand make sure the adaptec driver is ready to go and then
just boot from the new RAID? that would be nice!

thanks


"Larry Struckmeyer [SBS-MVP]" wrote:

Hi Bill:

Wondering what you have done with/to the original disks? That is to ask if
they are still in the condition they were in when one of them failed?
Also, I don't understand when you say that the first disk and the second
disk contain different data? If this was a mirror (RAID1), the disks should
contain the same data.

So, before we go down the road of reinstalling SBS, can we confirm what you
actually had before the failure, what you have now, and what you would like
to have when finished?

Assuming that you really had, and still have, a mirrored set, have you tried
creating a boot floppy with a boot.ini that points to the second physical
drive as the boot/system partition to get booted on the mirror?

However, should you choose to start over from scratch, you are going to have
to have access to the exchange store, either from a backup, or by slipping
the disk that contains the exchange store into a working system and copying
out.

Which raises the point of backups? How old is the last known good backup?

--
Larry
Please post the resolution to your
issue so that others may benefit.


"billd" <billd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:175E95AA-2641-4C11-97DD-2D3DE2BBA3F6@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


I did something stupid about a year or so ago... I installed an SBS server
and put two disks in the server and used MS software RAID 1 on the these
disks to give redundancy. Big mistake. One of the disks failed. I
tried
replacing it and apparently even though it is the same size, I can't
rebuild
the mirror.. it won't boot on the secondary plex no matter what I do....
so,
then things just get worse, I thought I could clone the disk to a hardware
raid, but no cloning software works with dynamic disks. Dynamic disks
seem
to be about the worst thing anyone ever thought of in my humble opinion
anyway. I can't clone it, I can't seem to get it to do an ASR... I have
come
to the conclusion that the best way forward to get this on a hardware
array
is to rebuild the SBS. The SBS does exchange and file server.

The first physical disk contains boot partition and an exchagne logs
partition.
The second physical disk contains shared folders and exchange mdb
direcotory.

I will replace the first physical disk with a hardware RAID 1. Recreating
the file shares is easy and user accounts is easy, there are only 3 users,
so
I just create the shares and security and users and mailboxes... Mostly I
am
concerned about the exchange server and what to do about the domain. The
domain is terrapin.local, do I need to do anything before I reload, like
destroy the domain or something so I can recreate it?

How do I handle the exchange data? Do I need to try and do a backup, and
then restore the exchange data once I recreate the exchange server? It
would
be nice if i could just detach and re-attach the MDB data, but don't know
if
that can be done.

Does anyone know of any resources, howtos, or just advice to help out with
this reload?

I appreciate any and all help, I spent all last Saturday trying to deal
with
this filthy dynamic disk and only ran up against one wall after another
and
actually didn't make any progress at all.

Cheers


.

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