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Breaking a mirror

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by edrox

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Hi,

I have a client with 2 SCSI (9GB) disks on their (only) file server.
They are mirrored on his P200, 128MB RAM machine with 6 GB of data and 25 (heavy) users.
When they now do a write of more than 50 MB to the machine it dies, it can't handle the load (fairly logical).
I want to switch off the box, remove 1 disk, add an empty one, start the box and then break the mirror, and try to stabalise his system.
Has anyone ever done this succesfully? How long does it take to come up after removing one of the disks?
And if the box dies, do you think I can save it with my disk which I have taen out?

Thanks in advance,

Eduard de Vries
Ps I didn't spec or install this box! (just to make it clear)

7 replies

by ccoleman

What type of servers are you using. There should be configuration utility when you first boot the server that can assist in breaking and restablishing the mirror. Also you should be able to remove one of the drives and just add the new drive and it can restablish a mirror through the configuration utility of the server.

by edrox

Thanks,

the mirroring is the NT feature, I would never have chosen mirroring on software level, I believe in hardware mirroring/RAID or no redundancy, just good backups.
Thanks,

Eduard

by jerrym mcse+i / a+

Hi Eduard,
To answer your issue, you need to use performance monitor to determine IF the mirror is causing the machine to die. But answer your mirror question, just shut the box down, disconnect the 2nd drive, turn the machine 0n, does it boot? if not turn it back off and swich drives..connect the disconnected drive and disconnect the connected drive...the machine boots and should come up relatively quick, login as administrator, on the menu bar, start, program file, administrative tools(common), disk administrator, select the drive array and right click, left click on break mirror, update now, exit, shutdown, install new drive where disconnected drive is, boot system, ..etc
You need to be aware that the customer will no longer have any fault tolerance, if one of the hard disks should fail without mirroring or raid with parity..etc you will have to recover the system from backups. just a friendly pointer.
Thank you for the post! jer

by edrox

Thanks,

I will try this, I was just looking for someone who has done this before and survived it.

Will try exactly what you say.
And then try to get my customer to or buy a RAID adapter and to do it on a hardware level or not to do it.
Ihate software mirror/RAID solutions.

Eduard

by tbradley

Just in case you are one of the few and the proud to have Novell, simply go to nwconfig at the server console, volume options, and disable mirroring. Down the server, remove the old 2nd drive, ( or even leave it in ), and add the 3rd drive. Reboot server.

You have several options at this point, and that is to mirror system files only, and use the 3rd ( large drive for storage ), and use other backup options to save the data. It could even be as simple as a batch file to selectively copy certain files at midnight.

If the original drive fails, the mirror drive takes over immediately without having to reconfigure the server.

by edrox

Hi,

thanks. In my own company I have netware and am proud of it.
But my customer has mirroring through NT, the worst possible scenario. And this on a machine which is underspecd to do this.
I will try to boot with one drive and then break the mirror.
See where it gets me

Thanks,

Eduard

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