Domain Controller and RAID1

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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Dave
Posts: 1
Joined: 11 Jan 2013, 15:47

Domain Controller and RAID1

#1 Post by Dave »

I have a Windows Server 2008 SP2 that is a domain controller (with various roles). It had 2 ST3500320SV 500 GB drives that were mirrored. One had bad blocks so I broke the mirror and pulled it out. Given that the 500 GB drives were starting to lack space, I had ordered 2 new 2 TB drives (WDC WD20EFRX-68AX9N0). The idea was to replace the missing drive with one of the new ones and rebuild the mirror. Then break the mirror, pull out the other 500 GB drive, pop in the 2nd new drive and rebuild the mirror again... Well, I hadn't accounted for the new drives being Advanced Format drives!

When trying to create the mirror, I got the error message: "All disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size, and the sector size must be valid.". I read about every web page out there and tried a variety of possible fixes, none of which worked. This server is in production and I don't want to attempt anything too drastic that might bring it down... I applied the hotfix from KB2553708 and ran the Dell Paragon Alignment Tool (all drives are green and aligned).

My next thought was that the problem stemmed from the 500 GB drive being dynamic, thus messing up the partition table. I have read of various ways of non-destructively reverting a dynamic drive back to a basic one but I'm wary of using a hex editor to change the 42s to 07s or run TestDisk and write to a hard drive in production.

If I do run TestDisk successfully and the drive becomes a basic one again, would this allow for the mirror to be created? I haven't found any other posts about this so is this something to even attempt?

Thanks for the input!
Dave

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