Clustered Drive Letter Not Released on Failover

  • Thread starter Thread starter Robert Sandham
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R

Robert Sandham

When a cluster resource fails-over from one machine to
another, the drive letter remains on the original node
but the drive is not acessible. How can I force the
removal of the drive letter?

Thanks!
 
Reboot...even then, the drive letter will not be available to other
applications as it should be reserved in the registry.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Regards,
John
 
Rebooting isn't an option.
The scenario is this:

Drive is mounted on node1
Drive fails-over to node2

At this point, the drive should no longer be visible from
node1. However, the drive letter can still be seen even
though the drive cannot be accessed.

Want I am trying to do is force the removal of the drive
letter when the drive fails-over.
 
Hi Robert,

If I'm not mistaken, the behavior you're experiencing is "By Design". If
you able to write to both drives while it's owned by one node, then that's a
problem. See if the following article helps you understand the situation.

818878 Managing Disk Ownership in a Windows Server 2003 Cluster
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=818878

--
Hope this helps,
Mike Rosado
Windows 2000 MCSE + MCDBA
Microsoft Enterprise Platform Support
Windows NT/2000/2003 Cluster Technologies

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-----Original Message-----
 
Thanks for that. However, the article states:

"The second and third behaviors in this list are
different from the behaviors of Windows 2000-based
clusters, where Disk Management automatically removes
from the display disks that the cluster node does not
own."

The problem I am seeing is that disk management is NOT
removing disks that the cluster node does not own.

It's not a big issue, but I have a particular application
that is doing a lookup against bhe system path (which
includes a directory on a clustered disk). If a disk
can't be seen at all everything is fine. If the drive
letter can be seen but the disk cannot be accessed, it
throws a series of error messages.
 
Robert,

Are you using multi-path I/O software with dual HBA or SCSI controllers? So
I'm assuming you're talking about Windows 200 Clusters.

Have a feeling you're talking about a cosmetic issue in Disk Management and
here's why I say cosmetic. In Windows 2000 server clusters, Physical Disk
resources are used to control ownership of physical disks by each node in a
cluster. The server cluster architecture requires that each disk in the
cluster be owned by one node in a cluster at all times.

The cluster disk driver (ClusDisk.sys) controls the presentation of the disk
to the node. The following registry subkey represents the location of the
disks that the cluster disk driver manages access to:


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/Clusdisk/Parameters/Sig
natures

When a Physical Disk resource is not owned by a node or is in an offline
state, the cluster disk driver blocks that node from accessing the disk.
This prevents both nodes from accessing the disk at the same time, and
therefore it prevents the disk from being corrupted. All the disk signatures
that are listed in the Signatures subkey are blocked.

--
Hope this helps,
Mike Rosado
Windows 2000 MCSE + MCDBA
Microsoft Enterprise Platform Support
Windows NT/2000/2003 Cluster Technologies

====================================================
When responding to posts, please "Reply to Group" via your newsreader so
that others may learn and benefit from your issue.
====================================================

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
<http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm>

-----Original Message-----
 
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