Moving SAN Drives

[Chris VanderVelde]

I'm replacing my existing Windows 2003 Adv. cluster with a new cluster running Windows 2003 Adv. R2. I built the 2nd cluster and it functions fine. Now I want to unpresent the data drives from the old cluster and reattach them to the new cluster. I unpresented the drives from the old cluster and presented them to the new.

The drives show up, but they are completely inaccessible. In disk manager, the partition information is correct for the drive; however, the format information seems to be gone and there appears to be no data on the disk. I move the disk back to the old server and the same thing occurred. Furthermore, I'm unable to format or repartition the disk from either server.

In order to get the data back, I had to create a new SAN drive, reconfigure the cluster resource and restore the data.

Does anyone know why this occurred? Have I missed a step in the process?

I still have the original, inaccessible drive available and I like to see if I can access the data on this drive before making future attempts to move larger, more important disks to the new cluster.

[James Muell]

What storage platform are you using? If you did not reconfigure the disk the data by and large should still be there. Are you using multipath software? Sometime you will see the ghost of a drive in disk mgmt and not the real disk. If you see the disk you want on the new cluster host in disk mgmr you should just need to assign it a drv ltr, and then add it as a cl resource to a group.

[Chris VanderVelde]

We utilizing an EVA3000, the drive is configured as a RAID5 volume. I've tried to assign the drive a letter, but it's still inaccessible. The drive shows up on the server.

[JR-Pounds]

With Clustering the disks are not identified by LUN number or drive letter. Clustering uses a disk signature to identify a clustered disk and the disk signature information is stored in the registry. Disk signature information is written on the volume and recorded in the registry at the time the disk is first mounted and brought online. To get another cluster to recognize the disk, the disk's signature would have to be recorded in the registry. There are a number of recovery procedures for different cluster recovery scenarios on the support.microsoft.com web site.