Failed redundancy, drive or controller?
sorry for the long post, figure too much info better than too little
Server 2003, software mirroring, 2 SATA drives, Sunfire x2100
History
Drive 0 gave rare intermittent errors over a year and finally failed BSOD
Boot sector was still good and could boot the mirrored drive
------------
Position 0 Position 1
Old HDD, BSOD Old Good drive, failed mirror
Good boot sector No boot sector
Bought new drive, moved mirror to 1st position and made new drive the mirror
(still booting off floppy for 2 weeks)
-------------
Position 0 Position 1
Old Good Drive New Drive, good mirror
No boot sector No boot sector
Fixed boot sector on new drive and made it Drive 0 and ran like that for a week, without a working mirror
---------------------
Position 0 Position 1
New Drive Old Good Drive, no mirror
Good boot sector No boot sector
Finally fixed boot sector on old working drive, made it Drive 1 and reestablished the mirror.
------------------
Position 0 Position 1
New Drive Old Good drive, good mirror for one day
Good boot sector Good boot sector
Within 24 hours of syncing to 100%, the new drive started reporting errors until it detached itself
Now when I boot the system, I have to boot to the old working drive on Drive 1 and Disk Manager shows failed redundancy on both and the exclamation on Drive 0. When I right click the dynamic volume, it says that the drive status is active and working.
----------------
Position 0 Position 1
New drive, BSOD Old good drive, failed mirror
Good boot sector Good boot sector
Not sure what is failing here. Originally when the first drive failed and we were booting from the boot sector of the failed drive, but running from the mirror, that worked for a couple of months until we got the new drive... so sounds like working 2nd controller and working 2nd drive
When 2nd drive was in running for two weeks with new drive in 2nd position, there were no errors, so sounds like 2 good controllers and 2 good HDDs
So now that I have a new drive that won't boot, what is suspect, the controller or the new drive?
Server 2003, software mirroring, 2 SATA drives, Sunfire x2100
History
Drive 0 gave rare intermittent errors over a year and finally failed BSOD
Boot sector was still good and could boot the mirrored drive
------------
Position 0 Position 1
Old HDD, BSOD Old Good drive, failed mirror
Good boot sector No boot sector
Bought new drive, moved mirror to 1st position and made new drive the mirror
(still booting off floppy for 2 weeks)
-------------
Position 0 Position 1
Old Good Drive New Drive, good mirror
No boot sector No boot sector
Fixed boot sector on new drive and made it Drive 0 and ran like that for a week, without a working mirror
---------------------
Position 0 Position 1
New Drive Old Good Drive, no mirror
Good boot sector No boot sector
Finally fixed boot sector on old working drive, made it Drive 1 and reestablished the mirror.
------------------
Position 0 Position 1
New Drive Old Good drive, good mirror for one day
Good boot sector Good boot sector
Within 24 hours of syncing to 100%, the new drive started reporting errors until it detached itself
Now when I boot the system, I have to boot to the old working drive on Drive 1 and Disk Manager shows failed redundancy on both and the exclamation on Drive 0. When I right click the dynamic volume, it says that the drive status is active and working.
----------------
Position 0 Position 1
New drive, BSOD Old good drive, failed mirror
Good boot sector Good boot sector
Not sure what is failing here. Originally when the first drive failed and we were booting from the boot sector of the failed drive, but running from the mirror, that worked for a couple of months until we got the new drive... so sounds like working 2nd controller and working 2nd drive
When 2nd drive was in running for two weeks with new drive in 2nd position, there were no errors, so sounds like 2 good controllers and 2 good HDDs
So now that I have a new drive that won't boot, what is suspect, the controller or the new drive?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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No, windows host-based raid on W2k3 mirrors all writes, and does load balancing on reads very early into the boot process ... then in the few seconds after it boots before the mirroring code kicks in, it syncs up anything that might have changed into the boot process.
The 24-hours is classic indication of read errors on one of the drive, but that is an independent issue if you have a munged up file system. Decent diagnostics will confirm health of the drives and give you an idea of how many read errors they have had.
What is make / model of disk? Just because you paid $300 doesn't mean you got a $300 disk. They aren't making any models of disk drives today that they were making several years ago, so you MUST have gotten an old drive that has been sitting on the shelf degrading. Disk drives don't have shelf lives like one would think. They are somewhat like old car batteries.
Anyway, that "new" disk drive is not a new disk. It is an old disk, and I doubt it has any factory warranty remaining. It could very well be one of the problems you have besides unrecoverable read errors on the other disk, and a slightly munged file system.
The 24-hours is classic indication of read errors on one of the drive, but that is an independent issue if you have a munged up file system. Decent diagnostics will confirm health of the drives and give you an idea of how many read errors they have had.
What is make / model of disk? Just because you paid $300 doesn't mean you got a $300 disk. They aren't making any models of disk drives today that they were making several years ago, so you MUST have gotten an old drive that has been sitting on the shelf degrading. Disk drives don't have shelf lives like one would think. They are somewhat like old car batteries.
Anyway, that "new" disk drive is not a new disk. It is an old disk, and I doubt it has any factory warranty remaining. It could very well be one of the problems you have besides unrecoverable read errors on the other disk, and a slightly munged file system.
ASKER
Do you have any particular diagnostic tool that you prefer? The drive is either Hitachi or Seagate.
Both seagate & hitachi have freebies designed specifically for their disk drives. Just go to their website.
ASKER
Disk is a Sun disk. Hitachi HDS722525VLSA80 (250GB - 7200 RPM - SATA Disk)
go to hds.com and look for the disk diagnostics.
ASKER
I believe that once you boot off the mirror drive, Windows is no longer mirroring. Can you confirm that? The drives aren't even trying to sync and I noticed that the very first time I was booting from the 2nd drive instead of the 1st one.