Windows 7 Disk Management: spanned volume won't re-integrate missingdisk

miso wrote:

Nothing I can say but ditto. These schemes should be as independent of
the OS as possible.

If you mean "as independent of the concrete OS instance as possible",
I agree. On Linux I can recover a RAID array with any other not
too old Linux recovery CD, or on any other Linux PC, over any
other interface I like as long as I can get enough of the original
disks attached in some way so that the OS sees them.

OS dependency per se is not the issue, but being tied to a
specific PC is just stupid. And "stupid" is what I have
come to expect of MS. These people just do not get it and
consistently implement bad choices, because they think they
are so great that they do not need to look at what other
people have done. Organizational Dunning-Krueger effect.

In fact, make that as independent of the PC hardware
as possible. I was looking at a Datoptic port multipier
http://www.datoptic.com/esata-hardwa...er-spm394.html

I like the idea of it being driverless, so when my mobo fails, I'm not
screwed. In fact, if I use one, I'd probably buy a second eventually
just to have handy in the event the one I'm using croaks.

Get that second one with the first one and make sure you can
actually recover this way. From my personal experience,
hardware RAID implementations can be very, very stupid.
And make sure you can do DISK SMART monitoring over this
thing so you have some early warning if a disk goes bad.

MS has been trying to abstract files as their OSs have progressed.
"Docuements" was bad enough, but "virtual store" is over the top. Stop
hiding the damn files!

MS wants an easy experience for their users. Nothing wrong
with that, except that computing cannot be made easy today. So
they implement problems waiting to happen instead that screw
the user once some tiny thing works not quite as MS expected
it to work. Which happens att the tome with today's PCs, also
because MS engineering quality is still pretty bad.

Arno

On Saturday, January 5, 2013 4:28:54 PM UTC-5, Franc Zabkar wrote:
Disk 1 appears to have no partitions. That's why its free space

matches its size.



Try the following commands:



select disk=1

detail disk

DISKPART detail disk

Maxtor 6L300R0 ATA Device
Disk ID: 49721FF3
Type : ATA
Status : Online
Path : 0
Target : 1
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : PCIROOT(0)#PCI(1401)#ATA(C00T01L00)
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No

There are no volumes.


list volume

DISKPART list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- ---------
--------
Volume 0 Spanned 931 GB Failed
Volume 1 G DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 2 E Seag 1TB Da NTFS Partition 736 GB Healthy
Volume 3 D Seag 1TB Bo NTFS Partition 195 GB Healthy
System
Volume 4 H System Rese NTFS Partition 100 MB Healthy
Volume 5 C SanDisk SSD NTFS Partition 111 GB Healthy Boot

select volume=x

detail volume

DISKPART detail volume

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 465 GB 1024 KB *
Disk 2 Online 186 GB 0 B *
Disk M0 Missing 0 B 0 B *

Read-only : No
Hidden : No
No Default Drive Letter: No
Shadow Copy : No
Offline : No
BitLocker Encrypted : No
Installable : No

Virtual Disk Service error:
The object is in failed status.

Use a disc editor to examine Disk 1.

I`ll download those later and post the results later.

Yousuf Khan

On Sat, 5 Jan 2013 18:27:54 -0800 (PST), Yousuf put
finger to keyboard and composed:

DISKPART list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 186 GB 0 B *
Disk 1 Online 279 GB 279 GB
Disk 2 Online 465 GB 1024 KB
Disk M0 Missing 0 B 0 B *

DISKPART detail volume

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 465 GB 1024 KB *
Disk 2 Online 186 GB 0 B *
Disk M0 Missing 0 B 0 B *

How is it that Disks 0 and 2 appear to have swapped places? Does it
matter?

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On 1/6/2013 5:36 AM, Arno wrote:
miso wrote:

Nothing I can say but ditto. These schemes should be as independent of
the OS as possible.

If you mean "as independent of the concrete OS instance as possible",
I agree. On Linux I can recover a RAID array with any other not
too old Linux recovery CD, or on any other Linux PC, over any
other interface I like as long as I can get enough of the original
disks attached in some way so that the OS sees them.

OS dependency per se is not the issue, but being tied to a
specific PC is just stupid. And "stupid" is what I have
come to expect of MS. These people just do not get it and
consistently implement bad choices, because they think they
are so great that they do not need to look at what other
people have done. Organizational Dunning-Krueger effect.

In fact, make that as independent of the PC hardware
as possible. I was looking at a Datoptic port multipier
http://www.datoptic.com/esata-hardwa...er-spm394.html

I like the idea of it being driverless, so when my mobo fails, I'm not
screwed. In fact, if I use one, I'd probably buy a second eventually
just to have handy in the event the one I'm using croaks.

Get that second one with the first one and make sure you can
actually recover this way. From my personal experience,
hardware RAID implementations can be very, very stupid.
And make sure you can do DISK SMART monitoring over this
thing so you have some early warning if a disk goes bad.

MS has been trying to abstract files as their OSs have progressed.
"Docuements" was bad enough, but "virtual store" is over the top. Stop
hiding the damn files!

MS wants an easy experience for their users. Nothing wrong
with that, except that computing cannot be made easy today. So
they implement problems waiting to happen instead that screw
the user once some tiny thing works not quite as MS expected
it to work. Which happens att the tome with today's PCs, also
because MS engineering quality is still pretty bad.

Arno


There is a thread on Tom's Hardware. The poster had 20 drives using 4 of
those boxes. He said he can rebuild on the fly. I'm not ruling out going
Drobo or other COTS solution. But I have more confidence in a system
that I build myself because I understand it.

The port multiplier in theory is OS independent. However, you do need to
be able to talk SATA, so the mobo needs a driver. But this is borderline
pedantic.

Not only does MS hide the damn files, but in win7, they made searching
take a giant leap backwards. I use that Voidtool "everything" program.
It is so good, I don't bother indexing.

On Sat, 05 Jan 2013 17:32:55 -0500, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

It's a home PC, we paid the extra price for the Win7 Ultimate for
features such as this. Symantec's Volume Manager is a bit too pricey for
this setting.

I realize you're well beyond the shopping phase, but I would have
recommended DriveBender http://www.drivebender.com/ as an alternative to
MS drive spanning. I'm currently running it on a couple of systems and
haven't had any problems yet.

One system consists of 15 physical drives grouped as a single 28TB logical
volume, and the second system has 9 physical drives grouped as a single 13TB
volume. If a drive is removed from the pool, all data on all drives remains
readable.

--

Char Jackson

miso wrote:
[...]
There is a thread on Tom's Hardware. The poster had 20 drives using 4 of
those boxes. He said he can rebuild on the fly. I'm not ruling out going
Drobo or other COTS solution. But I have more confidence in a system
that I build myself because I understand it.

I agree. I just advise toget that spare controller and make
sure swapping it out works as expected.

The port multiplier in theory is OS independent. However, you do need to
be able to talk SATA, so the mobo needs a driver. But this is borderline
pedantic.

Ah, sorry. What I meant is that you are hardware dependent in
the sense that you are dependent on this specific controller
type. As long as you have a spare, you can recover the array
from a broken controller on any other hardware. But well
implemented software RAID is not slower or less reliable and
does away with the need for any spare hardware. If you have
that spare controller, (and it being driverless is definitely
a huge advantage!), the difference is small. If you do not
have it and then find out that it is out of production or
otherwise hard to get when your main controller fails, the
difference is huge...

Not only does MS hide the damn files, but in win7, they made searching
take a giant leap backwards. I use that Voidtool "everything" program.
It is so good, I don't bother indexing.

Indexing is another of these broken "features". On my laptop
it made everything choppy until I turned it off. Never
needed it anyways, I know where I keep stuff.

Arno

On 05/01/2013 5:22 PM, Paul wrote:
The dynamic disk database is duplicated across all (dynamic) disks. The
question
would be, what happened to the dynamic disk database on the orphan disk ?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...48(WS.10).aspx

"Windows Server 2003 can repair a corrupted database on
one dynamic disk by using the database on another dynamic disk."

That's what I would have expected, based on the design intent of
having the database duplicated.

The orphan disk has two pieces of info. The MBR is specially marked,
to indicate the dynamic nature. Try a copy of PTEDIT32, and examine
what it shows on each drive. There should be something in the
MBR to indicate the disk is a dynamic disk. If the MBR was overwritten,
and the MBR on the orphan no longer indicates Dynamic, that's going
to "shoot you in the foot" right there. Not a leg to stand on.
A person could create that kind of damage, by using something like
TestDisk (which has an option to rewrite the MBR).

(Run as Administrator in Windows 7...)
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/englis...s/PTEDIT32.zip


(Partition type reference. To decode values seen in PTEDIT32)
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partition...n_types-1.html

Once a disk MBR is marked dynamic, then that "1MB thing" near the
end of the disk, has to be intact.

It's possible the dynamic database, uses info like hardware serial numbers,
or something equally reliable, to allow re-importing something that
got damaged. There's bound to be a way to fix this.

I tried to find tools from this list, on my WinXP Pro, but
there's really nothing (except diskpart perhaps). And I'm not even
sure anything in diskpart is appropriate. There is a "repair"
command, but it's for something else.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc737610

Okay, PTEdit worked!!! The partition table on this disk was showing Type
0 "empty", so I used Ptedit to turn them into Type 42 (Dynamic Disk). I
also had to fill in the remaining fields in that partition table by
hand: Starting Cylinder/Head/Sector = all zeros; Ending Cyl/Head/Sector
= 1023/254/63; Sectors Before = zero; Sectors End = Total Sectors -
2111. I found these other parameters out by comparing them to the other
disks in the dynamic volume. After doing all of that, I just rebooted,
and the volume came roaring back to life all on its own after the
reboot. Ran a chkdsk, it found no problems with the structure of the
filesystem. Checked several of the files on the disk, they all seemed to
have proper integrity. So it was just the partition table that was hosed
and nothing else!

Yousuf Khan

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:25:23 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:


One system consists of 15 physical drives grouped as a single 28TB logical
volume, and the second system has 9 physical drives grouped as a single 13TB
volume.


Wow! You have *big* systems. Are these home systems or are they used
in a business somewhere?

On 07/01/2013 1:25 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
I realize you're well beyond the shopping phase, but I would have
recommended DriveBenderhttp://www.drivebender.com/ as an alternative to
MS drive spanning. I'm currently running it on a couple of systems and
haven't had any problems yet.

One system consists of 15 physical drives grouped as a single 28TB logical
volume, and the second system has 9 physical drives grouped as a single 13TB
volume. If a drive is removed from the pool, all data on all drives remains
readable.

Are these all simple spans, or does this software also do software
RAID-5 or other RAID's?

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 05/01/2013 5:22 PM, Paul wrote:
The dynamic disk database is duplicated across all (dynamic) disks. The
question
would be, what happened to the dynamic disk database on the orphan disk ?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...48(WS.10).aspx

"Windows Server 2003 can repair a corrupted database on
one dynamic disk by using the database on another dynamic disk."

That's what I would have expected, based on the design intent of
having the database duplicated.

The orphan disk has two pieces of info. The MBR is specially marked,
to indicate the dynamic nature. Try a copy of PTEDIT32, and examine
what it shows on each drive. There should be something in the
MBR to indicate the disk is a dynamic disk. If the MBR was overwritten,
and the MBR on the orphan no longer indicates Dynamic, that's going
to "shoot you in the foot" right there. Not a leg to stand on.
A person could create that kind of damage, by using something like
TestDisk (which has an option to rewrite the MBR).

(Run as Administrator in Windows 7...)
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/englis...s/PTEDIT32.zip



(Partition type reference. To decode values seen in PTEDIT32)
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partition...n_types-1.html

Once a disk MBR is marked dynamic, then that "1MB thing" near the
end of the disk, has to be intact.

It's possible the dynamic database, uses info like hardware serial
numbers,
or something equally reliable, to allow re-importing something that
got damaged. There's bound to be a way to fix this.

I tried to find tools from this list, on my WinXP Pro, but
there's really nothing (except diskpart perhaps). And I'm not even
sure anything in diskpart is appropriate. There is a "repair"
command, but it's for something else.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc737610

Okay, PTEdit worked!!! The partition table on this disk was showing Type
0 "empty", so I used Ptedit to turn them into Type 42 (Dynamic Disk). I
also had to fill in the remaining fields in that partition table by
hand: Starting Cylinder/Head/Sector = all zeros; Ending Cyl/Head/Sector
= 1023/254/63; Sectors Before = zero; Sectors End = Total Sectors -
2111. I found these other parameters out by comparing them to the other
disks in the dynamic volume. After doing all of that, I just rebooted,
and the volume came roaring back to life all on its own after the
reboot. Ran a chkdsk, it found no problems with the structure of the
filesystem. Checked several of the files on the disk, they all seemed to
have proper integrity. So it was just the partition table that was hosed
and nothing else!

Yousuf Khan

Good catch!

Now, what erased the MBR ???

Paul