RAID cfg. question

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I have a situation involving a 3 disk RAID 5 configuration on a server that
will not boot. It’s possible that the drives have run out of drive space,
but we’re also not ruling out a corrupted OS (Win2k Adv. Server). The data
on the drives MUST be preserved, so our plan is to drop a new drive in the
server and install the OS on the new drive and retrieve the data that way.
But this is where I get stuck and need some help….

The drives in the bays are numbered 0, 1, and 2. If I drop a new drive in
an open bay (bay #4), would I need to change the drive numbers on the chain
so the new drive becomes drive #0 before I can actually reinstall the OS on
the new drive?

Or could I possibly just drop the new drive in and install on the blank
drive as would be done with a standard single drive configuration?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
I don't think full drives would prevent you from booting. What error message
or boot failure indication do you get. I also don't like your plan. Can you
boot from a bootable CD or emergency disk instead? If you mess with the RAID
array you could easily kiss your data bye-bye.
 
Jeff, thanks for getting back to me about this. Now that I'm onsite I can
give you a little bit better info on the situation - the drive configuration
is a mirror set, not RAID 5. I tried to boot the server and let it run for
about 15 minutes while it sat there and pretended to load. The progress bar
on the Windows 2000 screen would reach about 50% and then it would hang. I
booted into the recovery console, ran the "chkdsk /r" command and immediately
without checking any sectors or anything it shot back an error stating, "The
volume appears to have one or more unrecoverable problems."

What makes this more difficult is the original server OS disk is missing in
action, so it looks like someone is going to be without a server for a little
while.
 
Did you try removing the drives one at a time to see if the drive is holding
down the boot? Remote possibility. Beyond that, I would remove the drives,
install your new one load up an OS, down the server add your drives(maybe one
at a time) and see if you can access or recover.
 
As a matter of fact I did give it a shot trying to boot from one disk at a
time with hopes that one of them would bring up the server solo, but I didn't
get any further with one than I did with both. Again the OS would hang 1/2
way through the boot. I tried to rewrite the master boot record too with no
positive outcome. I've resorted to installing 2003 Server on 2 new drives
and I'm really hoping I can get to the data afterwards. I guess this is
what it takes to get them to finally get a backup DC, though the
circumstances aren't ideal.

I have another question for you though - recently the facility had me
change the admin password, but not all of the workstations were logged into
by the admin using the new password, so the new password would only work on
some of them (I'm assuming due to the domain admin profile on the local). On
some of the others the older password worked. But then there were a few that
neither of the passwords worked on. I tried logging on locally but that
wouldn't happen for me either. I tried to use the Offline NT Password and
Registry Editor to reset the admin password on those particular machines but
that didn't crack it. It would tell me that the SAM had been changed
successfully but after rebooting them I was back to where I started. So, now
that I'm stuck on getting into the machines, how in the world am I going to
go about getting into them to join them to the new DC once it's ready? If I
create an account for the workstations in question in AD and make the
server's name the same and also the domain name, and make the admin password
reflect the other password do you think I'll be able to get into it without
issues?
 
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