Windows 2000 mirroring disk

[ck]

Hi there,

I set up a server for friend. I put the OS on pri-master, data-secondary
master, then I put an identical drive on secondary slave. I went in to disc
managment, and mirrored the the secondary drives. Everything worked cool.
The secondary slave is in a swappable bay. I have a third identical drive
that I wanted to swap out and have the mirror reestablish every time I swap.
I broke the mirror, rebooted, and then I thought I could just re-mirror it.
That optioned is dimmed out. Do I reformat the drive each time and remake
the mirror set? I am kind of new to raid stuff. Any advice is appreciated.

tia
~ck

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

You might be wasting your time with your mirrors. These
days, disk failures are fairly rare. When a Win2000 installation
fails, it is in most cases due to some software or setup
problem - which of course is replicated to your mirrored disk!
Disk mirroring might protect you against 5% of all failures,
and will afford no protection at all for the remaining 95% of
all failures.

If you wish to establish a quick recovery method for a failed
server installation then I recommend this approach:
- Use an imaging program such as DriveImage or Ghost to
store an image of the server on your spare disk.
- Keep the spare disk away from the server.
- Update the image file once every two months.
- Keep two versions of the image file: The current one, and
the one before that.

 

[Henrik Ohm Eriksen]

To anskwer the question about the broken mirror - you most likely need to
make the new disk dynamic - make sure that is has same device address and
then you have to rebuild the mirror when the disk is recogniced... that
should be all.


Regards

 

[ck]

it is dynamic, how do I make the address the same? disk0 is the OS, disk1 is
data (mirror source), disk2 is the mirror destination, and then I show a
missing drive, this drive is the one taken out during the swap. How do I
make sure the addresses are the same? I am thinking about the ghost
solution. I could put an OS image and a data image on the two swap drives,
then just update the images every so often. That may be a better solution.
Thanks for all the advice.

ck