EvA 8100 Problem.

[Jody Campbell]

Good Day

have the following problem. I have presented 2 2TB drives to a HP server. This server has needed to be rebuilt. Upon being rebuilt I installed the MPIO software and scanned for the drives presented to the server. They are there but you need to format them, which leads to us restoring the data.

What am I doing wrong?

We need to rebuild this server this weekend but don't want into this problem.

Server has the exact name it had before and nothing else changes besides being reinstalled.

[Sheldon Smith]

If the drives were previously presented and formatted, the partition data should still be there. Windows? Have you tried just right-clicking on the partition, and assigning a drive letter? You may have to log off and back in once you have set the drive letter.

[Jody Campbell]

This is a windows 2003 Server, we did not have the option to assign a drive letter until we had partitioned and formated? it looked like the drives were in an unpartitioned state and we needed to create a new partition and convert the disk to dynamic.

We ended up having to format the drives as there was no possible way to reocover these drives.

Was it possible that during the installation process, the smartstart cd could have enabled us to format those two presented drives or would those drives not be presented until we install the MPIO software.

[Sheldon Smith]

I don't claim to be a Windows guru, but it's my understanding that, if using Dynamic disks, some of the volume information is stashed in the registry. For the vast majority, you should try using Basic volumes.

Using Basic volumes, I have unpresented vdisks from Windows servers and presented them to other servers with no problem whatsoever. Once scanned and seen in Windows' Disk Management, the volume should NOT appear as "unknown" bu rather as "Basic", and should have a partition. Once a drive letter or mount point is assigned to the partition, all data (volume label, etc) will show up.