Argh! server 2003 standard BSOD and immediate reboot! spanned

[Jaqie Fox]

Please help.... crud.

Here's the situation. I have a dual P3 600E tyan patriot BX system with a Syba Sil0680 PATA card in it, and a WD2000BB 200GB drive and Seagate 7200.9 120GB drive on it. Both are standalone master. I have a 10GB raid1 partition for the OS (windows is doing all raid functions, the card is in PATA JBOD mode) I have a spanned partition taking the rest of the space on both drives, that is brimming full of data.

I moved the computer to another case. When I started it, I did not notice it did not see the primary drive (200GB) and booted off of the second 'plex' on the Seagate 120GB. Since then, whenever I try to plug both drives in and boot the machine, it BSODs and immediately reboots, not giving me time to even see the BSOD. I have tried taking it out of the case and bench testing it to rule out a short circuit. It still works when booting with either hard drive on its own, but does not allow me to access the data on the spanned array (of course).

I could really use the data on that partition... Please, if you have any advice?

Resources at my disposal include my main machine (xp pro RTM sp2, ath64 x2) which I could hook both drives into the PATA channels and still boot windows (my os drive is a sata 320GB with the space to take all data off of the ailing partition)

and before anyone says it, that was my backup. the 320gb in my main system just got a loose connector so I had just moved all my data to the server drives in order to RMA this drive. d#$n the luck...

[cluberti]

There are 3rd party applications that you can purchase to allow recovery, but you'll need to boot to another hard disk that is set as the primary and install Server 2003 on it. Attach the other drives, hopefully it won't bugcheck, and you'll get to run utilities that should see the dynamic volumes. I've heard some decent things about this utility before, but I've never had to recover a dynamic volume myself.

Make sure you back things up in the future . To that note, I recommend something small, like a set of USB 2.0 drives and a Linksys NSLU2 or a D-Link DSM-G600 network storage unit.

[Jaqie Fox]

Thanks for the advice, but I bet it's something simple... I need to find a way to see that BSOD.

And as I said before, that was my backup... my brand new drive broke.

Worst comes to worst, I have a 20GB and a few 4GB drives I can install a sacrificial 2k3 install onto and do what you suggest.

Thanks again for the advice

~edit~

thought so. I dug around for a way to halt at the BSoD and I came up with the good old

0x0000007B (0x81965F00, 0xC0000010, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

Figures. Time to hit the workbench again.

Edited December 4, 2006 by Jaqie Fox

[cluberti]

I had my post ready to go and say "It's probably an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE bugcheck", but you beat me to it. I'm guessing you're gonna need to sacrifice a drive with 2k3 unless you have a current backup of the system state (you really SHOULD back that up when you're using Windows to do your RAID).

[Jaqie Fox]

Holy sh...

I plugged the two drives into my XP PRO SP2 machine (demia, the one I am on now).

It requested a reboot.

I did so (uncommon for me, but this time I knew it was a good thing).

Upon startup, there was a lot of hard drive activity... I started thinking about what that could mean, and decided to wait until it was done to check diskmgmt.msc ...

When I went in, I found it had restored the spanned volume 2k3 had made and put it on the same drive letter I had it on in the 2k3 machine.

Needless to say I feel a hell of a lot more secure about using 2k3's raid options than any other option now.

(note: I have had high end SCSI RAID setups before, DPT PM2865U3{u160} PCI-X w/128MB cache and a 10 disc RAID50 setup before, I am by no means new to RAID, just windows' software RAID)

I never thought I would say this, but Way to go microsoft!

[cluberti]

LOL - glad to hear things worked as they're supposed to .

[Jaqie Fox]

My point and why I got excited was that I had never seen anything stating that windows 2003 server's RAID was 'supposed to' work in Windows XP Professional, let alone across different architectures and controllers - without a single bit of user intervention in software. It went from a sil0680 PATA card in a dual PIII machine to an nForce4 PATA controller in an athlon64 x2 machine - and from Server 2003 to XP Pro. That is the first time I have seen RAID that is capable of going from controller to controller let alone from architecture to architecture, OS to OS - let alone with zero user intervention.

[cluberti]

That's because the information about the RAID is stored on the disk (and the registry of the host machine, but it's stored on the disk too). XP and 2003 read and write the same volume information regarding basic disks, and should have little trouble reading each others' RAID volumes.