I have a Win2k Pro machine which has 3 Maxtor HDD's setup as 1 spanned volume. It's 2 40Gig and 1 60Gig. I just added the 60Gig and ever since I've had nothing but problems. I'm at the point now where I believe the OS is pretty much trashed. It locks up after a few minutes with 0 activity. There are other strange things too, but I'm trying to keep this short.

So what I need to know is if there is anyway I can salvage my data. I want to completely format the BootDrive and reload everything. But will I end up losing all the info on those disks since they are spanned? It's not like removing a single hdd full of info is it? What can I do other than move it all to other hdd's then move it back?

Any help would be appreciated as I need to get this machine back up asap.

I have 2 ide drives in software striped. I think that the change to dynamic disks maintains some headers on the disks so they will be identified as a single unit. I have reformatted my boot drive many times due to the fact that I like to break things. Never once have I lost the software striped disks. I would think you'd be safe reloading the OS on the boot drive. You can check during setup if Windows still sees them as a single unit at the format /partition portion of setup. The disks will all be identified with the same drive letter. I suppose if setup does not identify them this way you could hit F3 and quit, then find another way to go about backing up the important stuff. Hope this helps.

???

So you had 2 40gigs set in Raid 0 and then you adding a 60g drive to the config? I'm not sure how you set this up.

Anyways the way Raid 0 (actually AID since there is no R) is that to put it simply half of the data is written to one HD and the other half the other HD. So yes....your data is lost.

I am going to guess the 60gig is a Maxtor, and if so, I think the transfer rate of the Maxtor 60gig is not guite up to snuff. It could be a timing problem between the drives.

About saving your data, you could be horked. Can you get any files copied before it crashes? If so, start with the high priority ones and hope you get it all before it's to late.

Another problem could be that the 60gig is on the same channel as one of the other drives and the controler freaks out. Try grabbing a Promise Ultra66(they are cheap) and put the 60 gig on that controler. That alone could solve your problem.

Good luck (

Thanks for the replies guys. Just to clarify things some. Using the spanned dynamic disks I can potentially add as many drives as I want to the setup. It's not a typical RAID 0 setup. Also, all 3 drives are 5400RPM Maxtors. I thought that would be fine, but I do see how this could maybe lead to problems. Think if I Ghosted the 60Gig to another 40Gig it would fix things? It would have to copy the headers over too that were mentioned earlier. Not sure if that would work or not. Oh yeah, I am already running a Promise Ultra 66. All 4 drives are on it(3 spanned and the BootDisk). As of right now, I can boot into Windows and all my files are intact. So I should be able to copy them to another drive if needed.

I'm thinking my 2 best options right now are most likely...

1) Ghost the 60Gig to an identical 40Gig and hope it copies the headers and any other important files needed to keep the spanned disks running.

2) Take a shot at a complete reload like Stephen mentioned and pray that it recognizes the span during setup.

Neither seems like a gauruntee, but I gotta try something.

Any other thoughts before I make a decision? I'm going to grab another beer and think about this some more. If I'm lucky I'll p*** out and this will all be a dream when I wake up.

hehe, it edited out the word p@ss

[This message has been edited by Topshelf (edited 20 December 2000).]

Topshelf, 35 is the limit on spanned dynamic disks. (Might as well be as many as you want, I'd love to see the disk housing for that many disks, probably would look like a SAN.) I did a bit more research on MSDN and am very confident you will not lose your spanned disks if you just setup.You might(but very unlikely, I've not seen it happen) lose it initially but the disk admin snap-in can still repair and recover after you are up and running (dynamic disks are designed to be highly recoverable)if they are not found initially. All the drive info is not in a header as I said earlier but in that 8mb section at the end of the disk that 2000 won't let you format. I don't think ghosts supports dynamic partition info, be interested to see if it works though.

Dosfreak, topshelf is using spanned disks, a feature of dynamic volumes. Some of the other features include being able to mount a disk to a folder within another disk (very cool, almost unix like), spanning, and of course raid setups.

Hmmm, haven't played around with dynamic disks. I've read up on them but never found the time to experiment. Gonna get some new hardware tho. 3 IBM 40gs' (2 40gs in raid). I'll get to play around with it then. YAY!

Yeah, I don't think I'll reach 35 disks anytime soon

Thanks for all your help. I'm feeling better about this already. So I'm down to 3 questions before I try to fix this.

1) Do you think it's fine to use the 60 and 40's together? Or should all the drives be identical?

2) Right now I'm running 2kPro, but if I reformat and start over I want to use Advanced Server. Will this cause any new issues with recovering the spanned disks or work exactly the same.

3) Lastly, am I better off unplugging the 3 hdd's until the OS is fully configured? Or just leave everything running during setup and let it fly?

Again, thanks for the help.

Well I just got this off of Symantec's site. So I guess the Ghost option is out of the question now.

Ghost compatibility with RAID

Situation:
You want to know if Ghost is compatible with RAID.

Solution:
Ghost is not compatible with RAID systems. That is, Symantec Ghost 6.5 and earlier do not support RAID controllers on the computers that are being imaged.

Software RAID
Ghost will not work with software level RAID.

Hardware RAID
Although it is not a supported feature, Ghost may be able to create and restore images to hardware level RAID systems as long as you are loading the appropriate DOS driver to support this. DOS drivers can usually be obtained from the RAID hardware manufacturer.


[This message has been edited by Topshelf (edited 20 December 2000).]

Well here's a kicker. Turns out my NIC went bad and was crashing the system on me.

Thought I'd pull the harware out 1 by 1 before reloading just to make sure it wasn't something stupid like that. Luckily, it was something very stupid. I'll pop a new one in tomorrow and hope it works now.

Thanks for all the help though.