Creating a Mirror of the C: Drive in Windows 2000 Server

Creating a Mirror of the Boot Partition in Windows 2000 Server

Module compatibility:

What's this?

Materials:

Working complete PC

Blank Diskette

Student Diskette, "New Boot A Ver 2.0+"

Student CD-ROM, "Room 6359"
Objectives:
The student will become familiar with:

The nature and function of Dynamic Disks,

Usage of the Windows 2000 Disk Administrator,

The nature and function of RAIDs,

The implementation of a RAID-1 mirror set in Windows 2000 Server.
Competency:
The student will continue learning about Windows 2000 dynamic disks, usage of Disk Administrator, and RAID storage technologies. The student will learn in this module how to implement asoftware RAID-1 mirror set on the Windows 2000 Server.

Preparation

Prior to mirroring (RAID-1) the boot partition of a Windows 2000 system, like any RAID volume, the drive must first be upgraded to a dynamic disk. This operation is slightly different than doing the upgrade to disks that do not hold the boot partition. Incidentally, Microsoft calls the partition that is set active and holds the file NTLDR the system partition and they call the partition that holds the operating system installation in the WINNT folder the boot partition. It is important to keep this straight since these names are backwards from what you would expect.

First perform the upgrade of the system/boot partition drive to a dynamic disk. Then install an additional completely zeroed drive on the system and Write a Signature and Upgrade it to a Dynamic Disk as well. At this point proceed with the procedures below to construct the mirror of the C: drive on the server.

Procedures

With the Disk Manager open right click on the C: drive partition of Disk 0 and locate the "Add Mirror..." menu item:
Click the item and select the desired disk to use for the mirror drive. In this scenario one additional drive was added to the system and already had a signature written to it and it was already upgraded to a dynamic disk (see Write Signature and Upgrade to Dynamic Disk tutorial. Be sure to click on the icon of the disk in the window and then click the "Add Mirror" button:
Upon mirroring the boot partition a warning message box will be displayed:
Click "OK" and DM creates the new partition on the target disk and begins to regenerate the entire contents of Disk 0 onto Disk 1. This process should not be interrupted:
When the regeneration process is complete the partitions will look like this:

Testing the Mirror and Recovering from a Drive Failure

At this point the mirror is up and running and completely operational. In order to test the system and boot to the mirror it will be necessary to create a boot diskette with RAID-1 support. Once this has been done proceed to the next phase in which this RAID-1 will be tested.

Once the boot diskette with RAID-1 support has been made proceed to the tutorial on testing the systems RAIDs.