Thanks for the article. An excellent overview of Win2000 disk management for those of us who are familiar with NT.

Damien Salamone 9/13/2002 7:08:31 PM

I agree that DM is an awesome tool in W2k, however, a client of mine had a failed disk 0 in a mirror. I removed the failed disk, created a boot floppy to disk 1 by editing the ARC path. The problem was when I replaced the failed disk, I couldn't get the disk to boot without the floppy. It appears that the MBR was gone and could not be regenerated. I had to format a disk, recover from backup, and remirror the drive. Now doesn't that defeat the purpose of mirroring?

Jon4/30/2002 10:38:37 AM

I agree with most of your artical on Windows 2000 Disk Management, but you failed to answer the same question that my direct contact at Microsoft was unable to resolve.
How do I remove and swap a mirrored disk in 2K. NT4 could be shut down and have its mirrored disk swapped out and it would re-establish the mirror on the new drive when rebooted. 2K is too smart for this. 2K needs a disk to be dynamic in order to establish a mirror but going dynamic creates a disk identifer that will not allow the mirror to re-establish on a different drive after swapping.
Disk failure is not my concern, virus protection is, so I like to maintain a clean mirror of my system on two drives that get swapped weekly. (I've yet to have a virus find its way to the drive in my desk drawer)
My initial thought would be to manipulate the identifer on the dynamic disks and make both of my mirror disks the same ID but that wouldn't help if I needed to use one as the new system disk after a failure.
Any input would be helpfull.

Christoper2/11/2002 5:34:56 PM

Anger was the first emotion I experienced after being puzzled when first trying to get my new 40 gig HD running on my win2k box.



Why? Because I am still unable to perform the simple operation of making the disk available to partition magic so I can prepare it for a multiboot system I want to install. The new so-called 'dynamic' volume system makes the HD unmutable by partitionmagic, and although I have found three references to converting dynamic volumes to the good ol' kind, none of these references give any hint as to 'how' to go about doing that.



Unbelievably, doing a search in the win2k helpfiles for the word 'fdisk' yield nothing.


Jorisvan Dorp 6/5/2001 9:54:10 AM

I had two identical scsi drives mirrored, with partitions C: and D: - I had to break the mirror on D:
I expected to have an extra partition, say F: if my cdrom was E:.
What I got was a mirrored C: partition and two UNALLOCATED partitions. I'm trying to recover the data even as we I write this.

Rick Donaldson 3/12/2001 11:13:03 AM

Loved the Win2K Disk Management article. Even I've been able to figure out some of these services. In a recent project I had to break a mirror on a 2 drive system for system integrity and do a new install on the root drive. After reinstall, DM showed a third volume as "Missing". It was labeled a system drive, so using all the tricks in the book I couldn't get it to delete. After getting all the data over from drive 2, I wanted to re-attach the mirror. 2K doesn't allow that since the drive still shows up a a system volume. I rebooted from a win98 floppy and fdisked the drive 2 to remove the Non dos volume. At this point I could get the drives mirrored again, but now have two "missing" system volumes in addition to the Dynamic drives that are mirrored. Is this going to be a "regedit" to get rid of those two listings or do you know of another work-around.
Thank you for any input.

Michael Amundson 5/27/2000 11:57:06 AM