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

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 20:55:27 -0500, Paul put
finger to keyboard and composed:

Good catch!

Ditto.

Now, what erased the MBR ???

I suspect that the user accepted Windows' invitation to initialise the
drive. Many users do this without realising that "initialisation" is
data destructive, probably because the term sounds innocuous.

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

On 1/7/2013 7:37 AM, Arno wrote:
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


In theory, these RAID volumes should follow a standard. That doesn't
seem to be the case in practice. I still have a RAID 5 array stashed
away that I'm going to try to recover some day. I had a mobo fail and it
used a fake raid. The RAID10 could be recovered in another PC without
issue, but not Raid 5. I tried to recover it with Pared magic, but it
just couldn't put the array back together I had a hackup, but not
totally up to date.

There are FreeNAS proponents that prefer to do the RAID completely in
the OS.

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:43:21 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

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?

Home systems.

Both systems are just about out of capacity so I'm watching HDD prices with
the idea that the 15-drive system (16 drives if you include the OS) can be
expanded to 24 drives and the 9-drive system (10 with the OS) can be
expanded to 13 drives. By then, both systems will be physically out of room
and it's either time for an additional server or piecemeal replacement of
2TB drives with bigger units.

--

Char Jackson

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 13:56:47 -0500, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

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?

Drivebender is simple spanning, (they call it pooling, as in older versions
of Windows Home Server). You can designate any number of folders for
duplication and Drivebender will ensure that the two copies are always on
different physical disks, but if you need more than that you have to add it
yourself. SnapRAID or FlexRAID make nice additions, for example.

--

Char Jackson

miso wrote:
[...]
In theory, these RAID volumes should follow a standard. That doesn't
seem to be the case in practice.

Sort-of but not quite. The on-disk format is sort-of standardized,
which basically just stripe size and order variable. But the
metadata (disk ID, array ID, flags for all kinds of things, etc.)
is not at all standardized.

I still have a RAID 5 array stashed
away that I'm going to try to recover some day. I had a mobo fail and it
used a fake raid. The RAID10 could be recovered in another PC without
issue, but not Raid 5. I tried to recover it with Pared magic, but it
just couldn't put the array back together I had a hackup, but not
totally up to date.

There are FreeNAS proponents that prefer to do the RAID completely in
the OS.

I have been using Linux software raid for 10 years without problems,
almost all running 24/7 and one installation was the two fileservers
for a computing cluster.

Arno

On 07/01/2013 9:39 PM, Franc Zabkar wrote:
On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 20:55:27 -0500, put
finger to keyboard and composed:
Now, what erased the MBR ???

I suspect that the user accepted Windows' invitation to initialise the
drive. Many users do this without realising that "initialisation" is
data destructive, probably because the term sounds innocuous.

That's a possibility, but he didn't mention doing that, but I'll ask him
directly. He did mention trying the "Reactivate" command in Disk
Management, which of course didn't work. Could Reactivate call an
Initialize? Judging by how quickly & automatically things came right
back after the reboot when the partition table was intact, I would've
expected no need to even touch any of these commands, so either they got
run before the reboot (in a desperate attempt to get things back) and
ended up causing the problem after a reboot, or something truly external
erased the partition table perhaps during the communications problem to
that disk.

Yousuf Khan

On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 01:05:39 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:43:21 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

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?

Home systems.

Both systems are just about out of capacity so I'm watching HDD prices with
the idea that the 15-drive system (16 drives if you include the OS) can be
expanded to 24 drives and the 9-drive system (10 with the OS) can be
expanded to 13 drives. By then, both systems will be physically out of room
and it's either time for an additional server or piecemeal replacement of
2TB drives with bigger units.


Wow, again! You must have lots of very big files--video files perhaps.

If you add up everything on all three of my drives here, it comes to
something around half a terabyte. Add in the drives in the other three
systems in my home--my wife's machine, my laptop, and my Windows Home
Server--and the total is around 1.5 TB.

On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 08:27:31 -0500, Yousuf Khan
put finger to keyboard and composed:

He did mention trying the "Reactivate" command in Disk
Management, which of course didn't work. Could Reactivate call an
Initialize?

I don't know, but I would think not. Microsoft's technical articles
aren't really helpful in this regard, though. I like to see what
happens at the bits-and-bytes level, but Microsoft rarely goes that
deep.

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

On 08/01/13 05:47, miso wrote:
On 1/7/2013 7:37 AM, Arno wrote:
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


In theory, these RAID volumes should follow a standard. That doesn't
seem to be the case in practice. I still have a RAID 5 array stashed
away that I'm going to try to recover some day. I had a mobo fail and it
used a fake raid. The RAID10 could be recovered in another PC without
issue, but not Raid 5. I tried to recover it with Pared magic, but it
just couldn't put the array back together I had a hackup, but not
totally up to date.

Linux md raid can work with disks from many types of Intel fake raid,
and might be able to put your array together again. No guarantees, of
course, but if you want your data back it is worth investigating. If
the raid5 disks are small enough, then you can make images of them to
another disk (or two) and use the image files when trying to assembly
them with mdadm - then you have no risk no matter what you do wrong.


There are FreeNAS proponents that prefer to do the RAID completely in
the OS.


A great many Linux, BSD and Unix systems use software raid - there are
many reasons why it is often preferably to hardware raid. And pretty
much every low or medium price NAS system you can buy uses either Linux
or BSD with software raid.

In the windows world, fake raid or hardware raid is the norm, but in the
*nix world software raid is very common.

Franc Zabkar wrote:
On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 08:27:31 -0500, Yousuf Khan
put finger to keyboard and composed:

He did mention trying the "Reactivate" command in Disk
Management, which of course didn't work. Could Reactivate call an
Initialize?

I don't know, but I would think not. Microsoft's technical articles
aren't really helpful in this regard, though. I like to see what
happens at the bits-and-bytes level, but Microsoft rarely goes that
deep.

- Franc Zabkar

Reactivate might exist for the purpose of handling a "hot inserted"
span or RAID member. Like plugging a SATA drive into a SATA backplane
with the power on.

If you're cold-booting with all members restored
in a set, it likely puts the mess back online all by itself.

There's no reason for "Reactivate" to delete an MBR. The
only thing that would do that, might be "convert Dynamic to Basic",
complete with its own warning dialogs etc. As a Dynamic to Basic
conversion is going to remove the protective 0x42 value and
allow the MBR to hold regular partition type entries.

http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partition...n_types-1.html

"42 Windows 2000 dynamic extended partition marker"

Paul