Disk 0 Raid 1 mirror problem

[Mike]

Folks,
I have a Windows 2003 Server with 2-73Gb SCSI disks setup in a Raid 1
configuration. It has worked great until yesterday. A message appeared on
the screen saying that one of the drives had a error and my mirror was no
longer working. It turned out to be Disk 0.
I booted off of the mirror (Mirror Drive C - Secondary Plex) and the machine
came up fine. I ran Dell Diagnostics on the drives, and it checked out fine.
Dell thinks the drive is fine.
When I look at Logical Disk Manager, Disk 0 has a yellow triangle with an
exclamation point (I guess referencing a problem), and Disk 1 has no such
issue.
When I right click on either disk the "Break mirror" is greyed out, and the
only option I have is to "remove mirror".
If the problem disk were disk 1, I would just break the mirror and try to
recreate it, but with the problem being on disk 0, can I do this the same, or
will that cause me problems.
I guess I don't want to lose my setup, and wanted to make sure I can
recreate the mirror using Disk 1 as the "good" disk, and disk 0 as the disk
to recreate on. Anyone done it this way?

With Dell's advice, I tried to swap the drives (couldn't find any jumpers to
distinguish the Drive ID), but that didn't work. Got a message on boot
stating "Loading PBR for Descriptor1...done", but it stopped there.

Can I recreate the mirror off of disk 1 to disk 0?

Thanks,

Mike

 

[Graham]

Hi Mike, Remember I had this last week as well.
Whatever you do - dont "Remove" the mirror. I did and then when I rebooted
it never came up on any disk.
One of us had to go up and rebuild the enitre machine.
I'm pretty surprised no one has came back to us on this ,expecially MS.
Our server is due an upgrade within the next couple of months and I wish I
had just left it up and running on the one drive until the new machine came
in.
"Mike" wrote:

> Folks,
> I have a Windows 2003 Server with 2-73Gb SCSI disks setup in a Raid 1
> configuration. It has worked great until yesterday. A message appeared on
> the screen saying that one of the drives had a error and my mirror was no
> longer working. It turned out to be Disk 0.
> I booted off of the mirror (Mirror Drive C - Secondary Plex) and the machine
> came up fine. I ran Dell Diagnostics on the drives, and it checked out fine.
> Dell thinks the drive is fine.
> When I look at Logical Disk Manager, Disk 0 has a yellow triangle with an
> exclamation point (I guess referencing a problem), and Disk 1 has no such
> issue.
> When I right click on either disk the "Break mirror" is greyed out, and the
> only option I have is to "remove mirror".
> If the problem disk were disk 1, I would just break the mirror and try to
> recreate it, but with the problem being on disk 0, can I do this the same, or
> will that cause me problems.
> I guess I don't want to lose my setup, and wanted to make sure I can
> recreate the mirror using Disk 1 as the "good" disk, and disk 0 as the disk
> to recreate on. Anyone done it this way?
>
> With Dell's advice, I tried to swap the drives (couldn't find any jumpers to
> distinguish the Drive ID), but that didn't work. Got a message on boot
> stating "Loading PBR for Descriptor1...done", but it stopped there.
>
> Can I recreate the mirror off of disk 1 to disk 0?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mike
>

 

[Mike]

Graham,

Yes, I'm surprised MS hasn't responded, I see MS employees responding to all
kinds of things, and this is a very serious issue (at least to me).
Thanks for your response. I haven't figured out how to respond to this, but
I have not done anything yet, and my machine is up and running on the
mirrored drive.
I created this request because no one responded to yours (except me) and was
hoping just that someone missed your question, but I guess not.

I am going to call a friend today and see if he has any advice. If I find
anything out, I will let you know.

Thanks,
Mike


"Graham" wrote:

> Hi Mike, Remember I had this last week as well.
> Whatever you do - dont "Remove" the mirror. I did and then when I rebooted
> it never came up on any disk.
> One of us had to go up and rebuild the enitre machine.
> I'm pretty surprised no one has came back to us on this ,expecially MS.
> Our server is due an upgrade within the next couple of months and I wish I
> had just left it up and running on the one drive until the new machine came
> in.
> "Mike" wrote:
>
> > Folks,
> > I have a Windows 2003 Server with 2-73Gb SCSI disks setup in a Raid 1
> > configuration. It has worked great until yesterday. A message appeared on
> > the screen saying that one of the drives had a error and my mirror was no
> > longer working. It turned out to be Disk 0.
> > I booted off of the mirror (Mirror Drive C - Secondary Plex) and the machine
> > came up fine. I ran Dell Diagnostics on the drives, and it checked out fine.
> > Dell thinks the drive is fine.
> > When I look at Logical Disk Manager, Disk 0 has a yellow triangle with an
> > exclamation point (I guess referencing a problem), and Disk 1 has no such
> > issue.
> > When I right click on either disk the "Break mirror" is greyed out, and the
> > only option I have is to "remove mirror".
> > If the problem disk were disk 1, I would just break the mirror and try to
> > recreate it, but with the problem being on disk 0, can I do this the same, or
> > will that cause me problems.
> > I guess I don't want to lose my setup, and wanted to make sure I can
> > recreate the mirror using Disk 1 as the "good" disk, and disk 0 as the disk
> > to recreate on. Anyone done it this way?
> >
> > With Dell's advice, I tried to swap the drives (couldn't find any jumpers to
> > distinguish the Drive ID), but that didn't work. Got a message on boot
> > stating "Loading PBR for Descriptor1...done", but it stopped there.
> >
> > Can I recreate the mirror off of disk 1 to disk 0?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Mike
> >

 

[Dave K.]

I have the same issue with a Dell 1750. Disk0 failed and the system was
running on Disk1. I was able to boot to Disk1 without issues. Since we are
going thorugh a move right now, I did not have time to take care of this so I
called Dell support and they sent out a "Tech." He broke the mirror, removed
the failed disk and replaced it with the new disk, and low and behold, the
system won't boot. He claimed that he did not know it was a software raid
configuration and the Dell engineer stated they do not support software raid.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr

Anyway, I was able to create a boot floppy and boot to Disk1, the good disk,
and recreate the mirror so I do have some redundancy to a point. I still
have the problem though that I cannot get the system to boot unless I use the
floppy. I have checked the boot.ini and cannot find any issues with it. The
only assumption I can come up with is that there is something on disk0 that
the system needs to boot itself correctly.

So, in a nutshell, did you find a resolution to your problem?

"Mike" wrote:

> Graham,
>
> Yes, I'm surprised MS hasn't responded, I see MS employees responding to all
> kinds of things, and this is a very serious issue (at least to me).
> Thanks for your response. I haven't figured out how to respond to this, but
> I have not done anything yet, and my machine is up and running on the
> mirrored drive.
> I created this request because no one responded to yours (except me) and was
> hoping just that someone missed your question, but I guess not.
>
> I am going to call a friend today and see if he has any advice. If I find
> anything out, I will let you know.
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
>
>
> "Graham" wrote:
>
> > Hi Mike, Remember I had this last week as well.
> > Whatever you do - dont "Remove" the mirror. I did and then when I rebooted
> > it never came up on any disk.
> > One of us had to go up and rebuild the enitre machine.
> > I'm pretty surprised no one has came back to us on this ,expecially MS.
> > Our server is due an upgrade within the next couple of months and I wish I
> > had just left it up and running on the one drive until the new machine came
> > in.
> > "Mike" wrote:
> >
> > > Folks,
> > > I have a Windows 2003 Server with 2-73Gb SCSI disks setup in a Raid 1
> > > configuration. It has worked great until yesterday. A message appeared on
> > > the screen saying that one of the drives had a error and my mirror was no
> > > longer working. It turned out to be Disk 0.
> > > I booted off of the mirror (Mirror Drive C - Secondary Plex) and the machine
> > > came up fine. I ran Dell Diagnostics on the drives, and it checked out fine.
> > > Dell thinks the drive is fine.
> > > When I look at Logical Disk Manager, Disk 0 has a yellow triangle with an
> > > exclamation point (I guess referencing a problem), and Disk 1 has no such
> > > issue.
> > > When I right click on either disk the "Break mirror" is greyed out, and the
> > > only option I have is to "remove mirror".
> > > If the problem disk were disk 1, I would just break the mirror and try to
> > > recreate it, but with the problem being on disk 0, can I do this the same, or
> > > will that cause me problems.
> > > I guess I don't want to lose my setup, and wanted to make sure I can
> > > recreate the mirror using Disk 1 as the "good" disk, and disk 0 as the disk
> > > to recreate on. Anyone done it this way?
> > >
> > > With Dell's advice, I tried to swap the drives (couldn't find any jumpers to
> > > distinguish the Drive ID), but that didn't work. Got a message on boot
> > > stating "Loading PBR for Descriptor1...done", but it stopped there.
> > >
> > > Can I recreate the mirror off of disk 1 to disk 0?
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> > > Mike
> > >

 

[Mike]

Dave,

I feel your pain, and am disapointed that someone from MS hasn't responded
to this issue. As for Dell, I got the same response, "we don't support
software raid", and the tech I was working with when I originally opened the
ticket with them tried to help me by doing some research himself, and we
e-mailed back and forth a couple of times, but he didn't have any luck either.
Look at your boot.ini file carefully and make sure that the boot partition
that you want to use is set up correctly, you have to make sure the disk,
rdisk, and partition are all pointing to where you want them to. I can be a
bit tricky. Did you copy the floppy's boot.ini file to the HD?
If you have the boot.ini file configured correctly that's the only reason I
would think it wouldn't work. Sorry about your troubles, and more sorry
someone from MS has not responded to either of us.
By the way, my disk wasn't bad (just had hiccuped in some way and broke the
mirror), and I was able to regenerate the disk and recreate the mirror and
was up and running.
In the future, I will try to do HW mirroring in the future, but it's a
significant cost factor.

Thanks,

Mike



"Dave K." wrote:

> I have the same issue with a Dell 1750. Disk0 failed and the system was
> running on Disk1. I was able to boot to Disk1 without issues. Since we are
> going thorugh a move right now, I did not have time to take care of this so I
> called Dell support and they sent out a "Tech." He broke the mirror, removed
> the failed disk and replaced it with the new disk, and low and behold, the
> system won't boot. He claimed that he did not know it was a software raid
> configuration and the Dell engineer stated they do not support software raid.
> Grrrrrrrrrrrrr
>
> Anyway, I was able to create a boot floppy and boot to Disk1, the good disk,
> and recreate the mirror so I do have some redundancy to a point. I still
> have the problem though that I cannot get the system to boot unless I use the
> floppy. I have checked the boot.ini and cannot find any issues with it. The
> only assumption I can come up with is that there is something on disk0 that
> the system needs to boot itself correctly.
>
> So, in a nutshell, did you find a resolution to your problem?
>
> "Mike" wrote:
>
> > Graham,
> >
> > Yes, I'm surprised MS hasn't responded, I see MS employees responding to all
> > kinds of things, and this is a very serious issue (at least to me).
> > Thanks for your response. I haven't figured out how to respond to this, but
> > I have not done anything yet, and my machine is up and running on the
> > mirrored drive.
> > I created this request because no one responded to yours (except me) and was
> > hoping just that someone missed your question, but I guess not.
> >
> > I am going to call a friend today and see if he has any advice. If I find
> > anything out, I will let you know.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Mike
> >
> >
> > "Graham" wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Mike, Remember I had this last week as well.
> > > Whatever you do - dont "Remove" the mirror. I did and then when I rebooted
> > > it never came up on any disk.
> > > One of us had to go up and rebuild the enitre machine.
> > > I'm pretty surprised no one has came back to us on this ,expecially MS.
> > > Our server is due an upgrade within the next couple of months and I wish I
> > > had just left it up and running on the one drive until the new machine came
> > > in.
> > > "Mike" wrote:
> > >
> > > > Folks,
> > > > I have a Windows 2003 Server with 2-73Gb SCSI disks setup in a Raid 1
> > > > configuration. It has worked great until yesterday. A message appeared on
> > > > the screen saying that one of the drives had a error and my mirror was no
> > > > longer working. It turned out to be Disk 0.
> > > > I booted off of the mirror (Mirror Drive C - Secondary Plex) and the machine
> > > > came up fine. I ran Dell Diagnostics on the drives, and it checked out fine.
> > > > Dell thinks the drive is fine.
> > > > When I look at Logical Disk Manager, Disk 0 has a yellow triangle with an
> > > > exclamation point (I guess referencing a problem), and Disk 1 has no such
> > > > issue.
> > > > When I right click on either disk the "Break mirror" is greyed out, and the
> > > > only option I have is to "remove mirror".
> > > > If the problem disk were disk 1, I would just break the mirror and try to
> > > > recreate it, but with the problem being on disk 0, can I do this the same, or
> > > > will that cause me problems.
> > > > I guess I don't want to lose my setup, and wanted to make sure I can
> > > > recreate the mirror using Disk 1 as the "good" disk, and disk 0 as the disk
> > > > to recreate on. Anyone done it this way?
> > > >
> > > > With Dell's advice, I tried to swap the drives (couldn't find any jumpers to
> > > > distinguish the Drive ID), but that didn't work. Got a message on boot
> > > > stating "Loading PBR for Descriptor1...done", but it stopped there.
> > > >
> > > > Can I recreate the mirror off of disk 1 to disk 0?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks,
> > > >
> > > > Mike
> > > >

 

[Hank Arnold (MVP)]

Mike wrote:

> In the future, I will try to do HW mirroring in the future, but it's a
> significant cost factor.

Agreed, it's a cost factor, but look at how much time (a.k.a. money)
you've spent on it already. this is one reason that many of us
vehemently object to software RAID in *ANY* circumstances, especially
with boot drives.....

--

Regards,
Hank Arnold
Microsoft MVP
Windows Server - Directory Services