Any way to force Windows 2003 to re-read files directly from a harddrive

[Brazen]

Ok, so basically, this is a snapshot from a SAN LUN mounted on this Win 2k3 server. I'm deactivating and re-activating this snapshot on a schedule from another server. Normally you would re-activate from this server and the SAN utility would take care of refreshing the cache, but this depends on the timing of a series of events from the other computer, so I'm having the re-activation initiated by the other server.

So anyway, the problem is, this snapshot (which the Windows Server sees as just a local harddrive) changes in the background, but due to the way Windows (and all OSes) cache file system data, this server doesn't see those changes. If I reboot, then it will see the changes, but there must be some way to tell Windows to flush it's harddrive cache and re-read from the physical medium.

 

[bsobel]

Unmount and remount the volume

 

[Brazen]

Um, I didn't know you can do that in Windows. How would you do that? I know on linux it is the mount and umount commands, but on Windows ??

 

[bsobel]

You should be able to find a command line tool to do it. More simply you can try http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/Sync.mspx (but I think a true unmount/mount will be better)