Bare Metal Recovery of System Volumes

[GregE]

Recovering Windows2003, documentation states that mirrored volumes cannot be basic disks but must be dynamic.

All of our "C" drives here are basic disks, nothing is dynamic. Does restore still happen, but just doesn't put data on the second (mirror) disk? Or am I not able to restore at all?

 

[sgabriel62]

I would think since the mirrors are offline and out of sync I would say yes - but since the disks are Basic disks - I believe I read it somewheres telling me the answer would be No.
I'll look around some more unless somebody has the answer already.

 

[JohanW]

What kind of mirroring are you using? If it's hardware mirroring, the disk is mirrored. If an application (e.g. TSM) is mirroring (e.g. database volumes), the files are mirrored. If it's OS mirroring, it's not mirrored because it's a basic disk.

I don't understand the question. If you're asking what I think you're asking, there is no second (mirror) disk.

 

[GregE]

What kind of mirroring are you using? If it's hardware mirroring, the disk is mirrored. If an application (e.g. TSM) is mirroring (e.g. database volumes), the files are mirrored. If it's OS mirroring, it's not mirrored because it's a basic disk.

I don't understand the question. If you're asking what I think you're asking, there is no second (mirror) disk.

They tell me it's hardware mirroring.

 

[GregE]

I would think since the mirrors are offline and out of sync I would say yes - but since the disks are Basic disks - I believe I read it somewheres telling me the answer would be No.
I'll look around some more unless somebody has the answer already.

Thats whats in the documentation which is why I'm trying to figure out if I'm hosed or not from anyone here who may know a method. The TSM client documentation says mirrored volumes have to be dynamic. If there is no workaround to this, I cannot implement bare metal recovery at all here, which is not a good thing.

 

[JohanW]

Windows does not see hardware mirroring - it's transparent to the OS.

Mirrored volumes have to be on dynamic disks if Windows is doing the mirroring.

In short, don't worry. (Alerting on the hardware mirroring is useful, of course.)

(You will see disks twice if you have redundant multi-path FC or something, but that says nothing about the internal redundancy of the disks (LUNs (volumes))).

 

[GregE]

Windows does not see hardware mirroring - it's transparent to the OS.

Mirrored volumes have to be on dynamic disks if Windows is doing the mirroring.

In short, don't worry. (Alerting on the hardware mirroring is useful, of course.)

(You will see disks twice if you have redundant multi-path FC or something, but that says nothing about the internal redundancy of the disks (LUNs (volumes))).

Regarding your second line, the documentation doesn't specify OS or hardware mirrors, so your info is very helpful. Thank you.