Primary Mirror Failure

Obdurate

Hello All,

I have been wondering about this question for a while now (unable to test it physically):

You have a W2K3 server that has a mirror drive for the operating system, Disk0 and Disk1; Disk0 is the primary drive.

If Disk0 fails, will the server continue to operate throughout the day?

I am leaning towards yes -- as the only difficulty I can really see is when I reboot the server and the boot.ini file is not found.

That being said I have seen conflicting information via the Internet

Regards,

Obdurate~

Technito

In most cases RAID1 is meant to be fault tolerant for data only. Aside from some kind of cluster failover technology, there's no way an OS can maintain operation when the drive it is installed on has failed. If you did run the OS on a mirrored array and the primary drive failed, then you would have to break the mirror and reboot the system from the drive it was using for fault tolerance. But you'll likely face issues getting it to boot correctly. So in the event of a disk failure containing the OS, I think most would find it more convenient to install a new disk drive and restore the OS from a recent backup.

macdude

If you have RAID 1 set up for your OS disk and one drive fails it will run on the other drive till you get a replacement drive and rebuilds itself. It is very common to see RAID 1 used for OS and RAID 5 or RAID 10 for data.