Oh dear,

Small technical problem with my home server. My home server has 4 HD's (2x U320 SCSI and 2x ATA133) . All is well with the scsi drives and at least the system boots and runs. Problem is the 2 IDE drives were setup as dynamic discs with a spanned volume. One of the drives has failed, and I want to recover the data off the other drive which contains 90% of the data anyway. Problem is I cant mount it as the volume is currently in a failed state. Selecting reactivate doesnt work. is there a way to force 2003 to ignore the failed disc and mount what it has.

The volume contained 110GB of music which I managed to backup before the thing failed, but also 50GB of ripped DVD's that I now need to re-rip. Doh.

Even though you might think the data was stored on the first disk, bear in mind that the NTFS structures would be spread across the logical volume (both disks).

Not a problem I've had, I'm afraid, because I've always treated spanned volumes as one disk - if one fails, they're both chucked out and restored from tape. Not what you want to hear I'm sure something can be done but not sure that it's part of Window's native capability.

As TKW says... Windows really doesnt have anything in its reportoir to fix. you could try deleteing the dynamic discs from the mmc and then re-importing them into windows...

but i had something similar before and ended up having to use a recovery program to salvage the data....

i reccomend Restorer 2000. which ive used to pull data off a "broken" dynamic disc in the past... well worth the investment i think

As it stands you are pretty much stuck. Loosing one of the pohysical disks which makes up a dynamic disk is like loosing part of a raid 0 array. eg data loss unless you can coax that drive back to life.

I wonder if Partition Magic or similar might be able to help? :rubchin:

After much fiddling lastnight, I gave up and destroyed the volume. Reformatted the remaining disc and copied what data I had back. Just need to sort out the DVD's.

From experience thats pretty much your only option with dynamic discs or raid 0.

(after all thats esentially what a dynamic disk is, striped).

If you want to do that RAID 5 (expensive controler) or 0+1 (requires twice as many discs) are safer options for your data.

From experience thats pretty much your only option with dynamic discs or raid 0.

(after all thats esentially what a dynamic disk is' date=' striped).

If you want to do that RAID 5 (expensive controler) or 0+1 (requires twice as many discs) are safer options for your data.[/quote']

Windows will do RAID5 without an expensive controller, more efficient in terms of space than 0+1, possibly less so in terms of CPU.

Windows will do RAID5 without an expensive controller, more efficient in terms of space than 0+1, possibly less so in terms of CPU.

Never seen windows do RAID 5, i know linux can, but have never used either in anger.

Got here too late - I'm sure there's a tool on Knoppix that can take a single HDD from an array and rescue whatever is left... :thumbdwn: