Help With Nt Recovery

[jayc]

I have an old server (running since about 1997) with NT 4.0, it is a dual processor machine with 3 hard drives.

 

When I first set it up I configured a Raid 5 array using the NT disk administrater. Basicly designated about 18 gigs in each of three drives and set them to Raid 5.

 

Worked fine

 

The years roll by

 

Blue screen of death with a MBR fault

 

To recover from this I re installed NT 4.0 and went into disk administrator and attempted to turn the raid back on. No luck, hard times and a rocky road.

 

After googling the net for a couple of days I found a hint about turning a service back on, tried that and recovered the raid and promptly moved the important files off the server onto another machine.

 

Several days later another blue screen of death with an MBR fault, but no problem I have my data

 

The months roll by

 

Suddenly I need some files that I did not move off the machine when it was accessable.

 

Re loaded NT 4.0 again, put in the service pack, got the networking card talking again

 

Went into disk administrator and once again I see three unknown 18 gig areas on each of the three hard drives, however I cannot remember what it was I did to fix it the last time (only six months ago, but I am an old coot and my bionic memeory bank aint so hot either)

 

Have been googling the net for several days now and find I can't remember the key words I searched on before either (getting old really suck)

 

Any NT gurus out there can give me a hand ? I can get into disk administrator, can see all three areas on the drives, when I select them all the choices are gray out in the tools. I am pretty sure that the last time I had to turn on some service or other but not even sure of that.

 

Jay Clark

the wireless guy

jay.clark@cntlwire.com

[Madmanmcp]

Hi Jayc, I've never really built a raid system but I have my old NT 4 MS Training Manuals and the Exam Cram books and maybe I can find something in them to help. Are you running NT Workstation or NT Server? Not sure if there is a difference in Raid between the two setups but at least I can look at the right book.

 

Did you reinstall into a separate partition from the three you are using for raid? The book mentions that all three need to be the same size, if you created a boot partition did it reduce the size for the raid partition that is on that drive?

 

Did you rebuild the boot.ini file and are the ARC names all correct?

 

Ok, I just looked in the Workstation manual and Raid is not mentioned, so it must be available in NT Server only.

Is that what you loaded?

[TCH-Tim]

I'm thinking it must be Server...Workstation only supports RAID 0. It's been awhile since I used NT4 and when I did I had a seperate utility to manage the RAID. But I'll google around and see if something pops out.

 

 

*waves down the street to Jay in Henderson*