Raid 1 in HP proliant ml 110 G3 with win server 2003

[gonzangus]

Hi, I have made a Raid 1 through the windows administration tool and the process was seccessfull, but when I tried the disk by separate the original disk reboot perfectly and the other disk didn't reboot. The system just stays still in a black screen previous to the win 2003 init screen.
I read somewhere that it could be a problem with the boot.ini file but this file didn't appear in the system.
Any help will be more than welcome.

[Roger Faucher · Accepted solution]

Hi:

The boot.ini file is a hidden file in the root of the boot partition. Since the drives are mirrored (RAID1), each drive should have a boot.ini but when the primary drive fails, the second drive boot.ini needs to 'point to' itself. So if the file looks like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=20
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows Server 2003" /fastdetect

change the file attributes to not hidden, not read-only and edit the PARTITION(1) to become PARTITION(2). I think that'll do the trick.

Make a great day!

Roger

[Roger Faucher]

Of course, you'll need to change both PARTITION(2) statements.

Roger

[gonzangus]

thank's Roger I will try with that.
Thank you very much (it's my first assignment in the work, I started here 1 week ago jeje).

[Roger Faucher]

If you're dealing with an actual failure of the first drive and they're formatted NTFS, it can be a challenge to edit the boot.ini file. Make sure you have a good plan for such an occasion. Sometimes swapping the drives is the easiest method (depending on SCSI/IDE, hotswap/not, etc.).

Roger

[gonzangus]

Hi again Roger, I've found the boot.ini file but it wasn't in the volume where is installed the operating system (the disk has 2 volumes), is in the d: volume.
The contents of that file is:
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Enterprise" /noexecute=optout /fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Boot Mirror C: -secondary plex"


So, do I have to change partition(1) to partition(2) in the statement with "rdisk(1)", or the problem is other???
Thanks a lot.

[Roger Faucher]

If you right-click My Computer and select Manage from the list, then double-click Disk Management (under Storage) in the left pane, you'll see a representation of all the partitions on your computer. One will be marked "Healthy(SYSTEM)" and that's the one with the functional boot.ini file. Another will be marked "Healthy(BOOT)" and that partition hosts the Windows OS. There could be more than one partition marked "Healthy(Boot)" in some systems.

Hope this helps and thanks for putting me over 10,000 points in the Microsoft forums. I was hoping to achieve that goal in less than 5 years and made it with less than 5 weeks to spare.

Make a great day!

Roger

[Roger Faucher]

Sorry. I didn't answer your question. I would want each partition's boot.ini to point to itself (in both statements).

Roger

[Paul Danaila]

Hi Roger and ALL,

I see the solution to set up RAID 1
using Windows functionality. But the ML 110 G3 specifications state that it is possible to set up RAID 0 & 1 in hardware. This was one of the reason I chose this server.
I updated the BIOS to the latest version.
Some of the problems went away as described
in the fix. Yet I could not figure out how to use the option RAID.
What really happens is that when the RAID option is selected both hard drives are asked to be on the first SATA channel (primary & secondary), but I could not find any information on how to do that. They are primary on channel 0 and 1. Channel 1 is not considered when the RAID option is selected.
There are only two SATA connectors on the motherboard. I have not noticed any jumper or so for configuration, in BIOS (as I have already mentioned) no option to move logic hard drives from one channel to another (even though this is what I think shall be the solution). It may be possible to play jumper positions for the IDE (or SATA?) drives.
I hope you will not find me too noisy, but I wanted really bad the server I/O controller to perform RAID 1 function.
I mention the hard drives they have same capacity (80GB) but different makers.

Thank you