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Cloning an NTFS Dynamic Hard Disk -- how?

S

Sensor

Senior member
I have a 4-disk spanned array under Windows 2k. Spanned arrays means they're identified as one drive. One of the four disks now has a bad sector 🙁.

I purchased an identical disk with the intention of cloning it and replacing it. Unfortunately, I can't get Norton Ghost to clone (no drives identified). I tried using MaxBlast since they're both Maxtor drives, and it gives me a "unidentifiable BPS error" or something. I really want to get the bad sector out without reformatting the entire array.

Any advice appreciated,
--Ed
 
I don't think you can 'clone' a dynamic disk in the middle of an extended dynamic volume like with other standard disks. Most reasonable priced retail utilities are not capable. Winternals.com now charges $299 for their DiskCommander to perform these functions. Like every new program which performs critical new functions saving users/systems from problems, this software is not cheap. (The last time I checked it was something like $160 - significant inflation and taking advantage of people with critical needs. Ah so much for the life of the greedy entrepreneur.) I wouldn't buy it. Eventually other utilities will do the same, but for now try some other solution unless you have your doctoral thesis on the lost sector, and then why didn't you back up such critical data?

I would run scandisk and forget the lost data. Then I would return your other drive, buy a new drive larger than all the other combined drives in the one extended volume, and mirror all the other drives to the new drive, then break the mirror and establish your new drive for data storage use. I would also get a faster drive (RPM and data transfer speed).
Mirroring may not be possible to do if you only have 2 IDE channels and they are all in use. This may be your situation since it sounds like you have four drives (IDE is my guess). Where do you connect your CD or DVD drive then or don't you use one?

I really don't know how to break an extended volume and then restore it. This is really beyond the means of most tech support and is much more difficult and reserved for those who like to write in bits and hex using low level utilities for drives.



 
Thanks for your tips.

These are four 4K080H4 drives. Maxtor 80GB's. There is no single drive I can purchase to mirror them onto.

I'm interested in your idea of "forgetting about it", but how can I mark it as a bad sector so that I don't write a program onto the bad sector in the future?

Furthermore, I pulled out the drive and ran a sector scan on it, and it returned NO bad sectors. Is it at all possible that Win2k is "imagining" the bad sector somehow?

Thanks,
--Ed
 
Is it possible to clone a single drive out of an array like you have? I.e., the drive with the bad sector - clone it and replace it in the array. ???

If a single drive in such an array can't be cloned, then it would seem that such an array is something to be avoided. I always thought that RAID arrays were designed to be immune to such failures?
 
I have not found a way to clone the single "bad" drive, which is exactly what I'm trying to find.

Norton Ghost won't do it. MaxBlast won't do it. Any other applications to try?

--Ed
 
Unless he has 4 IDE channels, his group of drives is not RAID 0, but it's called an extended volume using all drives to act like a single drive (done in software under Windows 2000/XP). There are some DEFINITE disadvantages to using DYNAMIC disks as opposed to BASIC disks. Restoration of data on a dynamic disk or a software (Disk Manager) array is one of the problems inherent with this newer technology. Utilities will eventually follow and become cheaper. Before that time he needs a solution. Most utilities including those mentioned above (except DiskCommander) only work on BASIC disks. DYNAMIC disks are a newer animal created with Windows 2000 and also found in XP. There are some significant advantages to using dynamic disks (changes to drives on the fly, extentending volumes, mirroring, striping.) Mirroring is what I recommend unless you really have more than 240GB of data on all four drives. If so, it's time to bite the bullet and migrate to SCSI (Ultra 160), which can handle bad blocks on the fly. Sorry, that's my opinion. With IDE/ATA/UltraATA, something like Scandisk or SMART (software) must be run to find and isolate the errors, whereas SCSI does this in hardware, automatically whenever an error is found.

This is what I recommend.
Maxtor has utilities to diagnose errors (only use in DOS) and a small utility to run SMART funtions within Windows to mark off those bad areas and run live analysis. Use the Maxtor utilities to mark off the bad sector/blocks/clusters. Your drive may be failing, in which case you need to find some solution fast. The longer you wait, the worse it may become. (I RMA'd a Maxtor drive late last year, easy no hassle process with Maxtor but I still couldn't recover anything on the drive.)
If you have many games or other software installed, first run SCANDISK and the Maxtor S.M.A.R.T utilites to mark off bad areas. (Pray they are successful, if not you are gonna have to figure something out on your own.) Then uninstall enough of the installed programs so that only your system and important data take up less space than what is available on the first drive on your extended volume (it must be less than the 80GB of the first formatted drive). Defrag so that all the data is consolidated on the first drive. Then COPY all your critical data onto the new 80GB drive (I have no idea how you can do this if all channels are taken up, but I'm guessing you have 6 channels since you never answered where your CD/DVD drive is!!!). [At this point, I don't see how you can either: 1. mirror existing data to another drive, since the extended volume is 320GB. 2. Break the volume down to the first HD with all the data on it, then mirror this drive to preserve data.] But if you can mirror the resized volume to the other drive, that's great otherwise resize the volume and then mirror to the new drive. Then break the mirror. Then break the old extended volume and remove the bad drive. Use the 80GB drive that was mirrored from the volume as the new primary, master Windows system/boot drive. (Your mirror will probably still 'think' or 'see' or display 3 other drives as part of the volume if broken but not resized, so it just won't find them, but it will still work. This 'ghost' representation can be freaky in Disk Manager.)

Forget the idea of using 3 or 4 drives in an extended volume. Instead, I recommend using one of the following two options.
1. Take two drives of the old drives and create a new RAID 0 stripe (one drive each different channel for a total of 160GB). Then mirror the previous mirror 80GB drive (copy) onto the RAID 0 stripe. Use the single 80GB drive that was first mirrored as the Windows system and boot drive and partitions and also for data storage (usually primary IDE channel, master). Install all programs and other other less important data to your RAID 0 stripe. Use the last drive as explained below for additional data storage.
2. Create what's called a "drive mounted to a folder" by Windows. With this technique, you can leave all your drives as BASIC and 'Mount a drive to an NTFS folder' instead of a drive number (you don't need a drive number). For example. On your C:\ drive you could create a new folder (it must have no data in it) called c:\GAMES Then in Disk Manager assign an unused, but formatted 80GB drive to the new C:\GAMES folder by going through the process to Change a Drive Letter and Path for the partion/drive, but after selecting Add, choosing the option 'Mount . . . to a folder' instead of a drive letter, then browse to the new directory/folder and select it. Then whenever you install any program to the GAMES folder, the programs are actually installed to the 80GB drive associated with the GAMES folder. (You can also remove the old drive letter for the same partition/drive, so this partition/drive only shows up under the folder/directory.)

This is a type of drive mapping that is available in 2000/XP. (This can also be done with DYNAMIC disks.)
With this type of drive mapping you could have more partitions on your drives than the letters of the alphabet. Windows 2000/XP support unlimited numbers of mounted drives. When something has problems, then you can just copy the drive using any imaging utility or a copy utility without any problems. Nifty, huh? Just mount each drive to some separate folder, or if the data is not critical, like games, then create either a RAID 0 or extended volume on dynamic disks for all the stuff (I would use RAID 0 - software striping for games).

I always keep all critical data on a separate BASIC partition (D:\ drive or higher partition number) on a BASIC disk so that it is easy to restore/copy data in the future. Windows will not boot from a RAID 0 stripe (Window 2000/XP in software) but will still boot from a dynamic disk. Use DYNAMCI disks and striping and extended volumes at your own risk. You also cannot reinstall Windows 2000/XP on a DYNAMIC disk without reformatting as a BASIC disk and overwriting the MFT on the DYNAMIC disk thus loosing all data on the disk (all partitions, volumes, stripes etc). MS provides no support or options to rebuild dynamic disks that I know of, which may explain the more highly inflated price of DiskCommander.

----

I don't recommend this method and have never tried this, because it seems hairbrained to me, but if you really want to try to 'clone' the drive instead of really preserving your data, try this.
Break the extended volume.
Insert the new drive on an IDE channel, format and convert the new drive to DYNAMIC (it must also have the same exact cluster/block sizes of the other drive that is failing).
Then mirror the bad drive to the new drive.
Remove the old drive.
Recreate the original extended volume in the right sequence with the new drive. :[

GOOOD Luck!!!! You're gonna need it if you try this, cause I don't think it will work, and am nearly certain this won't work, but this is what you really want to do, right?
Only attempt this if you don't care about the data and don't mind if it's lost, then just do it and learn.
 
Thanks, Justin, for an excellent tutorial! One can learn a lot on this forum.

Seems to me that this technology is not yet ready for prime time and should only be used on systems where the data is not vital unless it is thoroughly backed up.

Seems like Sensor is between a rock and a hard place.
 
I don't think there is anything wrong with using DYNAMIC disks in certain setups like using two RAID 0 arrays, one used as a back up for the other, or single drives mirroring each other, or even two dual-drive extended volumes backing up each other.

Not knowing the limitations of DYNAMIC disks can be a bummer when it affects your backup/restoration.
Mirroring is great (for single drives), just like performing a backup, except it happens live, real-time, all the time.
But then again there is nothing wrong with extended volumes either, but then they should be limited to 2 drives only so that they can be backed up to 2 other or 1 larger drive at some future time.

----

My errors: You cannot mirror either an extended volume (spanned) or RAID array (0 or 5) using Disk Manager.
 
Thank you for the advice, Justin.

Although possible, it'd be difficult to reduce all the data to 80GB's and then start a new array.

I'm not totally familiar with this "SMART" technology, other than the fact that I enabled it in the BIOS awhile ago. I'm not sure where to find Maxtor applications or anything that take advantage of it.

Your suggestion of switching to SCSI is the most appealing. I may do that -- but it'd be nice if I could mark the bad sector and leave the system intact until I have a replacement prepared. If you know where to find the software, I'd appreciate it.

I pulled the drive out and ran Maxtor's "PowerMax" software to do a low-level surface scan. Strangely, it came back with no bad sectors found. Is it at all possible for the error to be something in software instead? As I recall, although windows says "At risk" all over the place, it never explicitly stated that there's a bad sector floating around. It was WinZip, when I tried to unzip a file, that told me, "Possible error: Bad disk".
 
PowerMax is the software to test the HD. If it's not bad, then something else is happening.
S.M.A.R.T is the acronym for Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technologyl (originally used in SCSI). It's implemented in software for IDE/UltraATA and hardware and you still need to run SMART software in the OS for this predictive failure analysis to work. About SMART:
http://www.maxtor.com/products/diamondmax/techsupport/whitepapers/smart0.html

Your drives are not mirrored, but this is interesting and informative and may help you with a decision. Support FAQ from MS about Dynamic Disks:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q313061
 


<< . . . Although possible, it'd be difficult to reduce all the data to 80GB's and then start a new array.
. . . . >>

There are not many options to preserve your important data without other HD space.

I would backup all important data to a BASIC disk from your extended (spanned) volume asap, and reinstall the OS and use folder/drive mapping so that future problems don't effect you when you eventually have a real drive problem. Ignoring the future predicatment because it works today isn't good because the problem with your setup still exists in any future failure.

More info from MS:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q308209
 
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