Multi-partition redundancy.

[hutch--]

Over the last week I have had the 3rd disk on my dev box starting to fade, I had been progressively moving bits off it while the data was still OK. Yesterday it took a long time to boot and today much longer with one of the two partitions on the disk no longer working. CHKDSK could not fix it so I am in the process of backing up the second partition on the disk.

Will have a play with it after the backup is finished to see if it will format but I guess its on its way out. Now if this was a single disk machine it would be tragic but with 4 disks you spread the risk across 4 disks so its very hard to lose the complete machine from disk failure.

The disk that is failing is in a removable case so its just a matter of pulling it out and replacing it with another. I have 2 spare 500 gig disks in removable cases so in the short term I will just shove one of them in the hole, later will have to buy another 1tb disk to match the rest. This is the first WD Green disk I have had that failed, so far the rest have been fine.

[Magnum]

How old is the failed disk ?

[hutch--]

Andy, about a year. The older pair are faultless, the second newer one seems to be OK. I replaced it with an older 500 gig disk until I get around to buying another 1tb disk to replace it.

[Magnum]

Sounds like you just got a bad one.

I have 10 yr. old drives that still work.

[dedndave]

i had trouble with a few maxtor drives
that was when these higher capacity drives hadn't been "perfected"
they were 250 Gb model 7Y250M00673GA (Maxline Plus II)
went through 3 of the same ones

after that, i have bought WD Blue and Hitachi drives - no problems

[hutch--]

Yeah, I think its the luck of the draw, its the first WD Green I hav had that failed. Still the virtue of multi-disk machines made the point, moved out what I wanted off the damaged disk then replaced it. Reduces your chances of losing a machine down to 25% with 4 disks. If the boot disk fails I keep a disk image on another physical drive.

[Magnum]

That reminded me of something.

If my primary disk fails, can I restore the disk image to any disk drive and have XP continue to function ?

I am also hoping that M.S. will not require WPA when they stop supporting XP.

[dedndave]

just because they stop supporting it doesn't mean they don't want the money from it

what you want to do is make a backup image of the drive, when it is set up as you like it
then, if the disk crashes, you have the entire image backed up
it takes about 1/3 to 1/2 the drive space of the built drive
10 to 20 minutes later, and your ready to go

you can restore to any partition that is large enough
in some cases, you may have to re-size the partition after restore
i use EaseUs for that stuff

i use paragon to make images - there was a thread discussing the different programs not too long ago

[mineiro]

Raid can be one solution.

[Magnum]

just because they stop supporting it doesn't mean they don't want the money from it

what you want to do is make a backup image of the drive, when it is set up as you like it
then, if the disk crashes, you have the entire image backed up
it takes about 1/3 to 1/2 the drive space of the built drive
10 to 20 minutes later, and your ready to go

you can restore to any partition that is large enough
in some cases, you may have to re-size the partition after restore
i use EaseUs for that stuff

I guess XP sees another drive than the original, but you are OK because the other hardware is the same as when it was activated.

With Macrium Reflect, I only image what is actually being used, which for me is about one eight of the hard drive size.

[dedndave]

yah - if you image a drive, you also image the wpa authorization file - wpa.dbl, i think
the drive is not one of the pieces of hardware that it looks at
i can't remember all of them

CPU
SouthBridge
NIC card
video adapter chipset
and  few others

it's a "point system"
there are 10 points
as i recall, you have to get 6 points to pass
so, you can change out a video card and still make it
the NIC card is 3 points, for some strange reason   :P

[MichaelW]

I have changed the CPU, and IIRC the memory, without problems.

[hutch--]

Now the plot thickens, I have had problems with the 4th disk so I took it out and I am testing it on a PIV I have with the same setup for disks, the difference is I am not using the removable disk cases but tested the disk directly plugged into the board.

I have just tested the 3rd disk on the PIV and it reads correctly and the partitions are accessible but the 4th disk only reads the first of 2 partitions. mutter etc ....

I wonder if anyone else has had problems with detachable disk cases ?

[hutch--]

Results are even sillier than I imagined, the second 1tb disk started to show errors so I pulled it out, plugged it into another box and ran chkdsk with a number of options that made the second partition readable again then got the data I wanted off it with no problems.

After backing everything useful up, I deleted the partitions on both 1tb disks and reformatted them from scratch and now they read and write with no errors and no bad sectors. There used to be all sorts of decent disk analysis programs around but for late model disks the market seems to be a bit thin. I tried HDTUNE but it did not even recognise the problems that CHKDSK found.

[FORTRANS]

I wonder if anyone else has had problems with detachable disk cases ?

Hi,

   Yes.  Some seating problems and a disk started going bad.
Those drives had to be removed after the computer was shut
down.  Related, an external tape drive had problems until its
SCSI cable was replaced.

Regards,

Steve N.