I just spent a frustrating couple of days trying to upgrade the SATA controller on my Windows 7 workstation. The controller upgrade went smoothly but, in the process, my existing software mirror (RAID-1) broke and I could not re-establish it! Everything I tried to google was unhelpful, i.e., I never found anything beyond, "Delete the mirror and recreate it."
Both drives were still visible and with identical partitions/folders, but Windows Disk Manager reported "Failed Redundancy." As soon as I saw there was a problem, out came the external hard-drives and I spent those first 24 hours updating my offline backups. I then tried breaking the mirror, deleting the volumes on the 2nd drive, and then re-adding them to a new mirror. No go. No matter how I tried to do it, the new mirror immediately came up saying, "Failed Redundancy." Checking the Windows Event Viewer merely reported, "FT Orphaning : A disk that is part of a fault-tolerant volume can no longer be accessed."
FYI - I was also SUPER CAREFUL to consistently remove only the 2nd drive, i.e., so that I didn't accidentally nuke the copy I was keeping. (The original partitions on that 2nd drive had long-ago been nuked.)
MORE THINGS I TRIED
- The only suggestion I found online (that I hadn't already tried) was to click Reactivate Volume on the newly recreated (and 'failed') mirror. But this simply triggered a new "FT Orphaning" error in Event Viewer.
- I had originally upgraded from a 2-port controller to a 4-port Sil-3114 controller. Out of the box the 3114 was running the latest/final v5.403 RAID firmware. When my continued attempts to re-add the mirror kept failing I began to suspect the card. So I re-flashed it with the non-RAID firmware, v5.500. (I was able to do this from within the Windows driver! Very cool. I had to install the non-RAID driver afterwards, too.) Unfortunately this didn't help.
- I had already tried deleting everything on the 2nd drive from Windows
Disk Manager but I wondered if maybe there was some left-over MBR data
that had to be deleted. So I booted a copy of FreeDOS and ran the following command: fdisk /clearall 2
Unfortunately, that didn't help either.
WHAT FINALLY WORKED :-)
I have no idea why but re-arranging the drives' positions on the controllers did the trick! Specifically, I took one of the drives connected to the motherboard (not my boot drive!) and swapped it with the 2nd mirror'd drive. Other than that I made no additional changes to the drives, partitions etc.
It's disappointing, really, that after all these years the Microsoft software mirroring system still has such deficient error-reporting.
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3 comments:
Hi Toni,
Did one of these disks was part of a Sil-3114 RAID before you tried making it a windows software raid?
Did you try clearing the first disk or its mbr? Or only the second disk?
Regards,
Arik.
@Arik,
I never used the Sil-3114 "hardware" mirroring. I had everything setup and working properly via Windows (software) mirroring. The only reason I changed anything was that I wanted to install more drives.
Maybe the Sil-3114 numbered the drives differently, somehow, and the problem always ever was the order?
Hi Toni,
I tried connecting those drives to the on board controller and making a mirror. This time I got "All disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size". http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2714829
Seems that one of the disks is "advanced format" disk and the other is a regular/legacy one. Still trying to decide what to do but maybe this is something that is relevant.
Arik.
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