Recovering a Mirrored or RAID-5 Volume

The process of error detection and recovery for software fault-tolerant volumes is similar for both mirrored volumes and RAID-5 volumes The Windows 2000 response to the problem depends on when the problem occurred. For recovery of a hardware fault-tolerant volume, see the documentation for the controller that you are using.

Note

Marking a mirror as failed does not occur during a read, only during a write. The read cannot affect the data on the disks, so performing mirror error processing is not necessary.

The operating system usually continues to work normally. Users accessing resources over the network usually are not affected.

Be sure to back up important data immediately, because the volume is no longer fault tolerant. Use a new tape for backup, not an existing tape. Replace the failed disk and begin the recovery of the mirrored volume or RAID-5 volume as soon as possible.

During system initialization, if the system cannot locate a partition in a mirrored volume or a RAID-5 volume, it logs a severe error in the event log, marks the volume as Failed Redundancy and uses the remaining portions of the mirrored volume or RAID-5 volume. The system continues to function by using the fault-tolerant capabilities inherent in such volumes. For more information about the status of volumes displayed in the Disk Management snap-in, see "Planning a Reliable Configuration" in this book.