Dynamic Disk/ W2K RAID problem

[booster94]

I have a server that has a single 20 GB IDE HD. I have
added a 2nd 40GB IDE HD and I want to create a mirror
using software W2K RAID.

The 20GB was partitioned as a basic disk with one
partition taking up the whole drive. When I upgraded this
disk to dynamic and rebooted it now shows up as dynamic
simple volume, but shows a status of Healthy, Failed
(Boot).

I setup the new drive as dynamic, and right-clicked on the
old drive to "add mirror" but its grayed out. My guess is
this is because of whatever that Failed (Boot) means on
the original drive.

The system is up and running and besides that error
everything systems to be fine. Anyone have any thoughts
what the issue is or how I can fix it so I can create my
mirror.

Thanks
Dan

 

[Catadmin]

Have you checked your Event Viewer lately? That's where you'll find any errors that might be specific to adding in the new drive. Right Click My Computer, Manage, then open up EV. Check all three logs (Application, Security and the other one whose name I can't remember) just to be sure you've seen everything.

Usually a Healthy, Failed means some error occurred either in the switching of the disk to a Dynamic disk. You might want to back up everything on this disk, wipe the disk, recreate it as a dynamic disk and restore from the backup. But check the error log first to make sure it isn't something simplier. Catadmin - MCSA

 

[booster94]

I have checked the log and it was clean, no errors at all. Its not the new drive thats causing the problem, that seems to be working fine, just sitting there as unallocated space so I can setup the mirror. Its the old drive that was upgraded from basic to dynamic. The log thinks the upgrade to dynamic disk was successful. And really the only sign on a problem is in disk administrator where is status of the old drive is listed as "Healthy, Failed (Boot)". Thats why I'm confused because it seems to be both healthy and failed, and there is only one partition...I don't get it.

And of course it seems the side effect of all this is I can't mirror the drives (the option is grayed out).

Dan

 

[cfwdude]

You may want to look at this

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/...e/using/productdoc/en/sag_DISKconcepts_10.asp

It basically says that you need to have at least 1MB of free (unpartitioned) space prior to upgrading to dynamic. I remember reading somewhere on the Microsoft site stating you needed 8MB free. I found that after installed 2K server and upgrading the disk. I had no free unpartitioned space, and the server would not boot. Had to reinstall OS. (twice before finding info on leaving unpartitioned space. As a rule now, I always leave at least 8MB unpartioned on all drives in my servers.

~Good Luck