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BESR 2010 drive C: not appearing after migration from RAID 0 to RAID 1

paule123
Level 3

I have a Dell PowerEdge 1600SC with PERC 4/SC controller running Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise 32 bit.  Formerly had 1 SCSI drive in RAID 0.  I added a second SCSI drive and created a RAID 1 mirror.  System boots fine, everything seems ok except BESR 2010 shows the old C: drive in the list with the red X, and the "new" C: drive does not appear in the list even if I check Show Hidden Drives.

13 REPLIES 13

Markus_Koestler
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paule123
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Removed the \??\Volume registry entries as described, but still can't see the drive.

Markus_Koestler
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Hm, well no idea then, sorry.

paule123
Level 3

Some more information... I found this post about an enumeratevols.vbs script and tried it, results:

BESR sees drive letter: C:\
Can C:\ be imaged =  False


Then, I ran partinfo.exe and there's a warning in the report: "WARNING: Partition above extends beyond the end of disk."  This is 2 146GB SCSI disks in RAID 1.

=========================================================================================================================
Disk Geometry Information for Disk 0         Sector Count: 286,515,200   (17,834 Cylinders, 255 Heads, 63 Sectors/Track)
Signature: 403C403B
Detected Sector Size:   512
Detected Alignment:     1 MB
.........................................................................................................................
System               Part Table LBA   # Boot     BCyl Head Sect FS      ECyl Head Sect       StartSect         NumSects
=========================================================================================================================
C:\
   On Disk Values:                0   0  80         0   32  33  07      1023  254  63            2,048      286,746,624
   Calculated:                                      0   32  33         17849   71  14  

WARNING: Partition above extends beyond the end of disk.


Also note the C: drive appears in windows disk management as a Basic disk, Healthy.

Markus_Koestler
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Maybe you want to open a case with Symantec and report back the outcome ?

paule123
Level 3

Yes, I'm going to open a ticket.  Looks like the partition table needs editing.  I checked the disk with Paragon Partition Manager and it complained about incorrect partition table and refused to do any operations on the disk.

Markus_Koestler
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Maybe you would like to try http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php to fix the problem. I saved me a couple of times.

Markus_Koestler
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Have you had a chance to try gparted ?

paule123
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Well the long and short of it was I ended up initializing (wiping) the RAID and restoring from backup using the BESR recovery CD.  Windows booted fine, BESR worked and recognized the drive.  Just for the heck of it I ran PartInfo and it listed "disk errors" saying something about partition "cylinders not aligned".   So I used Paragon Partition Manager 10 Server edition to "move/resize" the partition, it took about an hour to do it's thing and PartInfo is happy now.

Prior to this, I tried various tools to modify the partition table and MBR, but couldn't get the right combination that would make Windows happy and not BSOD.

There's a serious bug in Symantec's BESR Partition Table editor - if you try to enter a large Total Sector count (say 286500100), it mangles the math and actually writes to disk something like 78123.   I used the partition table editor on an Acronis Disk Director boot CD for further experimentation.

Symantec support was a bit of an ordeal.  First trying to get my support contact infomation set up with "SymAccount" so I could submit a ticket was an all day affair.  Once the ticket was submitted, the first tech I interacted with was friendly and pleasant, but he couldn't receive attachments through the case system.  Had to email them to his corporate email account separately.  The email conversation I had with the tech through the case email address was not reflected in the Symantec Case portal (every other trouble ticket system I've seen keeps sync between the web portal and email)  He quickly realized he could not answer the question so he bumped it up to the "advanced" team.   This was on a Friday afternoon.   Paid for 24/7 tech support, case marked as "critical", but I don't get contacted by "advanced" team until Tuesday morning.  Hmmm....

So the advanced tech, nice fellow, but basically suggests restoring from backup as a solution.   Didn't seem real familiar with modifying partition info or low level disk structures  (at this level I really expected a hardcore low level disk wizard to be able to tell me what byte in what sector to edit)   I ask him about the warning in partinfo.txt that mentions "partition extends beyond the end of the disk".  Ooops, he hadn't seen that.  Sigh.    He asks me if I have a current backup.  Yes I do, made with LiveState Advanced Recovery 3.0 just before I created the RAID 1.  He's like that's really old, not sure if that's going to work.  Of course it does, I restore from these "old" backups all the time, using a BESR 2010 CD.  I don't know why an "advanced" tech would not realize the V2I files have been compatible across versions for years now. Sigh.

/rant off




Markus_Koestler
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So have you resolved the issue finally ?

Markus_Koestler
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Any news here ?

Markus_Koestler
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Any news here ?

Markus_Koestler
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Any Updates here ?