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2 questions about Disk failure recovery--1) on mirrored OS drive and 2) on Client raid 1 drives RRS feed

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    Well, it's time to test this new forum location!  Hope everybody has found it by now, and that someone out there can help with these questions.  Let me first say that I have purchased the book "Microsoft Windows Home Server 2011 Unleashed", and I find it very helpful.  I am new to this WHS environment, and need all the help I can get.  Now here are the real questions:

    I have installed WHS, and wound up with a C drive (60 Gb) and a D drive (800+ Gb) on a terabyte drive.  THen I installed another terabyte drive, and mirrored both C and D to it, using the WHS mirror feature.  So my question is, what do I do when one of these drives fails?  Will the system continue to work?  I noticed that after I made the mirrors, when I boot now I get two OS options, the second one annotated as "secondary plex" or something like that. Can I boot into either at will?  I can't find any documentation that tells what to do if either the main or the mirror drive fails, and how to tell which one has failed. 

    The second question deals with a client machine which uses a raid 1 mirror setup.  I know that it can be backed up by WHS just as a single drive system because I have done that, but what do I need to do if I have to do a bare metal restore?  I have seen a reference that says put the raid drivers ("F6" floppy contents) at the root level of the USB drive with the WHS recovery software, and they can be loaded during the restore process.  Any further illumination of how this works would be appreciated. 

    Thanks in advance!  I am so far very impressed with WHS 2011, and with this forum, and I know someone on here will be able to answer these questions. 

         ---Chuck

    Thursday, June 2, 2011 2:11 PM

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  • Question
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    Well, it's time to test this new forum location!  Hope everybody has found it by now, and that someone out there can help with these questions.  Let me first say that I have purchased the book "Microsoft Windows Home Server 2011 Unleashed", and I find it very helpful.  I am new to this WHS environment, and need all the help I can get.  Now here are the real questions:

    I have installed WHS, and wound up with a C drive (60 Gb) and a D drive (800+ Gb) on a terabyte drive.  THen I installed another terabyte drive, and mirrored both C and D to it, using the WHS mirror feature.  So my question is, what do I do when one of these drives fails?  Will the system continue to work?  I noticed that after I made the mirrors, when I boot now I get two OS options, the second one annotated as "secondary plex" or something like that. Can I boot into either at will?  I can't find any documentation that tells what to do if either the main or the mirror drive fails, and how to tell which one has failed. 

    The second question deals with a client machine which uses a raid 1 mirror setup.  I know that it can be backed up by WHS just as a single drive system because I have done that, but what do I need to do if I have to do a bare metal restore?  I have seen a reference that says put the raid drivers ("F6" floppy contents) at the root level of the USB drive with the WHS recovery software, and they can be loaded during the restore process.  Any further illumination of how this works would be appreciated. 

    Thanks in advance!  I am so far very impressed with WHS 2011, and with this forum, and I know someone on here will be able to answer these questions. 

         ---Chuck


    If you lose the drive in position 1 (the system/boot drive), and it's hot-swappable (you ARE using a hot-swappable SATA WHS right??), then just remove that drive and swap in another of equal size and let W2K8 R2 rebuild it. If the system crashed then I believe you'll either have to move the remaining mirror set member to position 1 or modify the boot order to boot from it's current position. I confess to not having used software RAID 1 since Windows NT 3.5.1 so things might have gotten better regarding this.

    This is one of the problems requiring WHS 2011 users to use their own data protection scheme. They are a lot more complex than DE in WHS1.

     

    Stuart
    • Proposed as answer by Ken Warren Friday, June 17, 2011 4:11 AM
    Tuesday, June 14, 2011 6:47 PM