RE: Change Tracks Per Sector on system Partition

Hello Rob,

Thank you for posting.

>From your post, my understanding of this issue is: You have problems
mirroring system partitions of a cluster to an offsite SAN due to differing
sectors per track between the local and remote disks. If this is not
correct, please feel free to let me know.

Based on my research, this error is only displayed for two reasons:

1. We cannot physically read the file system boot sector (mbs) usually at
sector 32 or 63 on a single partition drive.
2. The Sector we did read does not have the 55AA signature as the last two
bytes of the sector.

If your software mirror a Windows NT/2000/2003 operating system partition
that is on a disk that is translated as 63 sectors per track (63spt) to
another disk that is translated as 32spt, then the partition table entries
used to boot are not properly configured to boot if the shadow drive is
configured as the primary boot drive.

I would suggest we refer to the following steps to see whether the issue
can be resolved:

Solution 1: Enable drive translation for disks >8gb in the system BIOS -
this will change the default translation from 32spt to 63spt and allow the
mirroring to work without making any changes to the disk partition manually.

Solution 2: If you cannot enable translation or the drive remains being
translated at 32spt. We may use the Dskprobe utility to modify the disk
partition table. The Dskprobe utility is included in the Windows Server
2003 Support Tools, you may download it from the following link:
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 32-bit Support Tools
<http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6EC50B78-8BE1-4E81
-B3BE-4E7AC4F0912D&displaylang=en>

The partition table will most likely look like the following in
dskprobe.exe - where # is some variable number that changes from
configuration to configuration:

Boot Indicator System ID Partition tabel Index
SYSTEM NTFS / or DYNAMIC Volume Partition 1

Starting Head Ending Head
1 ###
Starting Sector Ending Sector
1 32
Starting Cylinder Ending Cylinder
0 ###
Relative Sector Total Sectors
63 #######

Change the STARTING SECTOR to be 32 as seen below:

Boot Indicator System ID Partition tabel Index
SYSTEM NTFS / or DYNAMIC Volume Partition 1
Starting Head Ending Head
1 ###
Starting Sector Ending Sector
32 32
Starting Cylinder Ending Cylinder
0 ###

Relative Sector Total Sectors
63 #######

This is because the BIOS uses the starting CHS values to locate the boot
sector.

Hope the above information helps. If anything is unclear or you have any
concerns, please feel free to post back. I am glad to be of assistance.

Have a nice day!

Steven Wang (MSFT)
Microsoft CSS Online Newsgroup Support

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--------------------
>From: "Rob Jeffrey" <technet@xxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Change Tracks Per Sector on system Partition
>Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2005 09:43:14 -0000
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>
>I am having problems mirroring system partitions of a cluster to an
offsite
>SAN due to differing disk geometry between the local and remote disks;
More
>specifically the tracks per sector is different, 32 on the local and 63 on
>the remote disks.
>
>The system setup is as follows:
>A two node MSCS cluster running Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition
>Each node has two local physical disks using hardware RAID 1+0 (10)
>The shared disk storage for the Quorum and Data partition is a Raid 5 SCSI
>JBOD
>
>I am using Veritas Storage Foundation to perform a software mirror of all
>disks to our offsite location. This works for all disks except the system
>partition which fails due to the difference in tracks per sector on these
>disks. I have checked disk on other (non clustered) servers and the TPS
is
>always 63.
>
>Why are these partitions set to 32 and how can I change this?
>
>BTW: I used the array diagnostics tool and diskpar.exe to access the disk
>geometry.
>
>
>

.

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