Reboot during recreation of mirror on dynamic disk causes BSOD

[Ries Spruit]

Hello,

Today one of our disks in our ML350 server failed. We are using a
software mirror with two dynamic disks. Replacing the drive gave
little problems, allthough the disk manager hung when promoting the
new disk to a dynamic disk.
Next I start the mirror creation process and then I made a mistake.
When recreating had completed for 1% I requested a reboot to get a
buggy server app up and running again. I expected to receive a warning
if this would be a problem, but although it is a (major) problem now I
received no warning at the time.

After the reboot Windows boots to about 3/4 of its blue progress bar
and the stops with a SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED' I found a KB
article specifying that the dynamic disk config is corrupt. But I do
not have a clue as how to start about fixing it. And ofcourse I do not
have any rescue disk which correctly reflect the last disk setup.
Starting in safe mode did not help, neither did chkdsk in the recovery
console. (I haven't tried fix mbr yet, but I believe the dynamic disk
config is not located there).

Any help or references to tools will be greatly appreciated. It is a
quite crucial server..

Thank you all for your prompt replies!

Ries Spruit
MCAD

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

You do have a mess on your hands. You are
right that fixboot and fixmbr won't help.

I'd suggest removing the new disk completely,
and then trying a full repair (the second repair
option) from the CD. This may or may not
proceed successfully.

If this won't work and you don't have a good backup
you are into disaster recovery mode. You could get
a partitioning tool such as Partition Manager that can
convert a single-partition dynamic disk to a
basic disk. Or you may be able to image-transfer
the individual partitions to a new, basic disk.

Whatever you do, be sure to make an image of your
good drive before you go in and edit it. And once this
is cleaned up get a hardware mirroring controller.

Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.

 

[Ries Spruit]

Yessir,

Although I hadn't seen your advice yet, I did follow it. I got things
working again by first using Ghost 2002 to image the working half of
the mirror to tape. Next I put the image back on the second disk et
voilà, we now have a basic disk with all our data and it boots too!
And I only lost about 5 hours of sleep over it!

Your comment about a hardware controller is also correct. This summer
I have actually installed a Smart Array 642 controller because I am
sick of the software mirror as well. So why am I still on dynamic
disks?? Because I have been looking high and low for a solution which
would let me move the image of the SBS install to a RAID5 config. In
the beginning I made the assumption to migrating using Imaging
software would fairly easy.

Unfortunately this is only the case if you spend $ 2000 or more on
server imaging products. I couldn't get Ghost 2002 to see the new
logical disk and PowerQuest drive Image, installed under Windows XP
wouldn't copy the partition on the dynamic disk..

So what's left is a bare metal restore or a fresh install. But the
fact that there's a BDC in the network actually seems to complicate
matters here. I think I will just have a go at it, but I expect too
have alot of ADS troubles if I want to get SBS running in an existing
domain.

Once again any advice is appreciated.

Thanks for your reply!

Ries