EVA 5000 & Business Copy

[Urban Petry]

The problem lies within the Windows operating system and how foreign dynamic disks are added (when the first disk is imported on the "snapshot" host, it also already "knows" about the existence of the second disk that will be presented later; but at the time of presentation of the second disk Windows has access to two different configurations - one now "outdated" on the first presented disk and a new one on the second disk)

Is there any specific reason why you use dynamic disks? Because you use SAN storage I don't think you use it for redundancy/availability reasons. If it is just because you want to be able to expand volumes/partitions, then you don't need them at all (both primary and extended partitions on basic disks can be extended by using the "diskpart" utility provided by Microsoft - even Windows 2000 can do it already). I never understood why Microsoft made dynamic disks the default option when setting up new disk drives - it has so many side effects/gotchas compared to in my opinion (at least in a professional environment with hardware RAID/SAN storage etc.) very few benefits.

I know the following suggestion hurts, but why don't you "convert" your dynamic disks back to basic ones. Unfortunately "converting" in this case means backup, recreation of the partition and restore of the data (implying lots of downtime), but I would rather have a bad time once and then no such problems in the future. (BTW it is possible to convert dynamic volumes back to basic ones without loss of data, but because it means playing very low-level on disk sectors and is completely unsupported I wouldn't recommend it on production systems ;-)

Urban

[CA1240335]

I was experimenting with dymanic disks, as these happened to be to hand to try this out. The production environment has basic disks, as its a W2K cluster.

I'll try again with basic disks.

Thanks for the explanation - very useful.