PC (Server) Failure, help accessing Raid 1 Drives

[darkewaffle]

I've never worked with a raid before, so bear with me. The server (Windows Server 2003 I believe) seems to have failed from a still unknown hardware problem, but the drives are still fine. As far as I know, the raid consisted of only two discs in a mirror setup. Both drives are Maxtor 200GB SATA drives, model no. 6L200M0. At the moment the priority is to get access to the drives on some other PC, but I don't really know what to do.

I hooked up both drives to another working PC (XP Home), and they were listed as "Dynamic" and "Unreadable" in Window's disk management tool. I know you can convert to basic, but as far as I know that will remove all the data. What do I need to do to re-construct the Raid? Or is there someway to de-construct it and, at least for now, simply turn both drives into normal disks accessible through Windows Explorer/etc?

Thanks in advance, let me know anything else that may help. Working with a server and a raid are all new to me.

 

[RebateMonger]

XP can't read a Windows Software RAID 1 array. And XP Home can't read Dynamic Disks, either. You need Server 2003 to read the RAID 1 array and/or XP Professional to read the dynamic Disks.

Easiest thing is to put Server 2003 onto another PC temporarily and attach the RAID 1 array and read it. And set up a backup system so this doesn't happen again. Never trust a single hard drive or a single RAID array with important data.

 

[darkewaffle]

Been working on this some more today. The second PC does in fact have XP Pro on it, my mistake. I don't know if that makes a difference however as to what I can do with it.

I tried taking the HDD that has the WS2k3 installation on it and booting from it on the other PC, but I'm running into some problems there. It gets as far as the windows loading screen for a split second, then a flicker of a BSoD message, and it restarts and repeats. Still not sure if I can do anything with that. I did find out that if I boot from the XP HDD I can explore and view the WS2k3 drive normally.

I also found out that the XP HDD will not boot properly in the server machine, which I think probably confirms a hardware issue at least.

I've never worked with WS2k3, are there any particular hardware requirements or some sort of setup the other machine may not have? Or, since it is in fact XP Pro, does that open up any new solutions?

 

[Lorne]

You will only get crashes/BSOD if you try to boot from one system drive onto another system unless there identical hardware. Hal and socket.sys's conflict.

Put the drives back into the org system and install an extra drive one the standard IDE controller (make sure nothing you want to keep is on thatone) and set teh bios to boot that drive and install windows on that drive, after the install is done you should be able to recover what you need from the raid or one of the mirror set.
Also note, Alot of times windowz wont let you read other domain drives from other systems but you can fool that if you know and setup the newly installed windoz with the same domain and passwords.

If during the time installing windowz again you have problems, That might point out where the org problem is and you can fix it and just reboot from the old raid setup. (possiblility)