This post is more than 5 years old
1 Message
0
32846
February 27th, 2003 16:00
dynamic disk over a hardware RAID-5 physical disk configuration recommendation
The option is available to configure the physical disk as basic disk or dynamic disk, over RAID-5. Basic disk is backward compatible with NT4 and Win9X. Dynamic disk is new to Windows 2000 and is promoted by Microsoft since Windows 2000 is released. It provides more feature than basic disk. I would like to use Dynamic disk over RAID-5. A Dell support person mentioned that Dell do not support this, nor MS recommends this? I don't see any reason why you cannot use dynamic disk over a hardware RAID-5 physical disk.
Pleas provide recommendation
Thanks
f_vo
28 Posts
0
February 28th, 2003 07:00
François
f_vo
28 Posts
0
March 1st, 2003 15:00
Dotkon, disregard my previous answer. I tried this and now my Raid5 combo is empty and i still cannot create a dynamic Raid5.
François
da_anderson
1 Message
0
March 7th, 2003 13:00
Setting up a Physical RAID5 array is independent of the Windows 2000 disk type (basic/dynamic). I have Dell 1650/2650's setup with the Hardware RAID5 raid array. Then updated the disk in Windows to Dynamic. The servers run fine.
Dell doesn't support Dynamic volumes on the Boot disk because of their Server Assistant Software. SA7.x software loads Windows NT 4 then creates the disk for your installation. If you have a Dynamic Drive created on the disk and then boot to SA7.x the SA software will crash because it can't read the dynamic volumes. You will have to delete your RAID5 container, and then boot to the SA disk to reinstall your server.
Foxbat46552
8 Posts
0
November 16th, 2005 01:00
We are having a serious issue with our PE2650 servers with built-in PERC3 RAID. We are running Windows 2000 Standard Server w/SP4 and have two RAID arrays, one RAID-1 and the other RAID-5. We installed Windows using the Dell CD-ROM, and converted both Disks to Dynamic Disks. Everything has been fine with this server, but today we needed to upgrade the amount of space available. We backed up the RAID-5 set, removed the Windows volume, demoted the Disk to a Basic Disk, and rebooted the server. Using the PERC BIOS Utility, I deleted the old RAID-5 container, removed the old drives, installed the larger SCSI drives, created a new RAID-5 container and let it initialize. When that finished, we rebooted the PE2650, logged in, ran the Disk Management console and was prompted to write a signiture on the new disk, which we did. Windows made this disk a Dynamic Disk which we went ahead and formatted to its maximum size.
We rebooted after restoring the directoies we had back up earlier and my cohort went to work restoring the SQL database on this volume. He asked me if I saw the "G:" drive, and indeed, there was a G: drive in Explorer which had the same volume label as the C: drive. It gets worse from here. Every time we'd reboot, it seemed more and more of Windows was running from the G: drive, and after the last reboot, we could no longer log in, and running Computer Management from another server and connecting the PE2650 showed the C: drive was not present, just the G: drive.
I had seen this once before and it was on a PE2800 server with RAID disks and Dynamic Disks under Win2K Server. I would say that there is some serious problem here with Windows 2000, Dynamic Disk, and Dell RAID adapters. I would also say "NO" to Dynamic Disks hosted by PERC.