Windows 2000 Drive Mirroring!?!

[SteveC]

Under NT4, You select the drives, and simply tell disk administrator to mirror them. OK, but under win2k, I believe I need to upgrade to 'dynamic disk' and then tell it to mirror. I can get it to the point where win2k thinks that the PARTITIONS are mirrored (and I believe that it works as both HDD lights flicker!). All so far so good.

Now, I shut the machine down, take out the 2nd drive and boot it up. Windows won't even attempt to restart (I don't get the boot menu even!) Under NT4, it works a treat!

Any ideas? (quite urgent server needs to be set up with this!!)

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Jorden]

Tried removing the second drive from the BIOS as well?

Btw, more help on mirrored drives can be found here on MS' Help Site

[Jorden]

Something more from MS' batch... something you knew already I guess, but found a way around?

In Windows NT 4.0 and earlier, mirrored volumes were known as mirror sets. Disk Management offers limited support
of mirrored volumes on basic disks. You can repair, resynchronize, break, and delete existing mirrored volumes, but
you cannot create new mirrored volumes on basic disks. You can create new mirrored volumes on dynamic disks only.

Jord.

[SteveC]

Yeah, but the mirror ain't bootable - that's me prob!

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Guru]

Why not just buy an HOT-ROD PRO ata-100 card? You can get it for under 50$ (us)!

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Join the MURC SETI team! | SETI @ MURC

"Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."

[SteveC]

Because this is in a Compaq ML370 and I'm using Ultra3 SCSI drives (but no RAID controller...)

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Guru]

Aaah!

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Join the MURC SETI team! | SETI @ MURC

"Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."

[EdSki]

Steve,

Maybe this will help:
http://support.microsoft.com/support.../q113/9/77.asp

grtz,
Ed

[Electric Amish]

So, did you do the upgrade to Dynamic Disks??

If not, here's how.

Go into the disk manager. Right click where it says Disk 0 and you'll get a menu. At the top of that is "Upgrade to dynamic disk".

Then you should just be able to select the partitions and right click and choose mirror.

That's how we did it here at work.

amish

[EdSki]

Electric,

I figured he already did that. Don't forget to change the top view to disk list.. took me a while to figure that one out

[SteveC]

Thanks EdSki!! That looks just the right thing for what I want!

(Although in NT4, the mirror was really a mirror )

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[DentyCracker]

ML-370, hehe got a 733 running seti for me hehehe. Nice being in charge of that network. Can I say hehe. No raid though just 1 9GB SCSI3 drive and a big-ass DLT TapeDrive

[Taz]

Should have gone for the DL380, nice rack mount with on-board SmartArray controller.

Personally I wouldn't trust software mirroring or RAID on a production Server especially when Compaq's RAID controllers are so good and relatively cheap.

[SteveC]

Woohoo! I sussed it! It's that stupid 39mb EISA utility partition screwing it up. Deleted that, re-installed Win2k, Mirrored the drive and it actually works!

I tested it just now too by getting people to hit the site it runs and took out one of the drives - a message popped up saying a 'drive in a fault tolerant system has become unavailable' but the machine carried on regardless! It'll boot off the remaining good drive too.

Me happy.

PS: Taz - I haven't got a rack to put the machine in! Also I had a budget of around £3000 for a compaq or IBM to get a server which met my needs (I got a 733 (one one CPU, one spare slot), 2x128MB PC-133, 3x9.1GB drives, 24Gb DAT, Windows 2000 server)

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[EdSki]

Great
You don't have much use for the utility partition without an array controller anyway

Grtz
Ed