Windows Server Software RAID Εκτύπωση

The following guide describes how to manually setup a drive mirroring (RAID1) in a Windows operating system.

As servers, which have been installed using our pre-build Windows installation, or ordered with the Windows Addon, already have a RAID level 1 configured and running, this guide is intended for custom Windows installations.

Preparation

First, please click on the Windows symbol in the bottom left corner, or press the Windows or Super key.
Type diskmgmt.msc and press the Enter key to open the Disk Management Utility.

Please find a quick overview of the utility below:

A: Main disk, that contains the operating system
B: Second disk, intended to be used for the RAID1 mirroring
C: Volumes (means partitions under Windows) on the main disk
D: Unallocated space on the second disk

If your second disk already has Volumes on it, please perform a right-click on them and choose Delete Volume on all of them.
Perform a right-click on the disk, which currently contains the operating system and click on Convert to a dynamic disk.
In the appearing dialogue, the main drive should already be selected. Please select the other drive as well, which you would like to use for the RAID1, click on Ok and confirm.
Now you have to determine if your system has been installed in Legacy Mode, or in UEFI Mode. Therefore, please click on the Windows symbol in the bottom left corner, or press the Windows or Super key.
Type msinfo32.exe and press the Enter key to open the System Information window.
In the right pane, you should see the BIOS MODE entry, which has the regarding mode (Legacy or UEFI) as value. If the named entry isn't present, the system is installed in Legacy mode. Then please proceed with the regarding section in this article.

Legacy

If your system is running in Legacy mode, the following steps should be performed on all Volumes of the main disk, from left to right:

1. Make a right-click on the regarding Volume and choose Add mirroring from the context menu.
2. In the appearing menu choose the preferred second drive for the RAID1 and confirm by clicking on Add mirroring.

Please ensure that all Volumes have been added to the mirroring and the synchronization is running, which is indicated by the reddish coloured Volumes and their status information.

UEFI

Every UEFI system has a so-called UEFI System Volume. This partition can not be mirrored automatically by Windows and must be manually copied and configured on the second drive. Like with Legacy, add the mirroring for the Volumes one by one, from left to right.

• For all Volumes, that do not have the EFI label, follow those steps:

  1. Please make a right-click on the regarding Volume and choose Add mirroring from the context menu.
  2. In the appearing menu choose the preferred second drive for the RAID1 and confirm this by clicking on Add mirroring.

• For the UEFI System Volume, please use the following steps:

  1. Create a UEFI System Volume with the same size on the second drive and format it with FAT32. Therefore, just make a right-click on the unallocated space of the second drive, select New Simple Volume and follow the dialogue.

  2. Copy the UEFI System Volume data from the first drive to the second. Therefore, we recommend to boot the server to the Rescue System (just raise a support ticket to put your server into rescue mode) and connect via SSH to it:

     • Locate the regarding partitions:

       parted -l

       This command will list the partitions of all drives. There, please search for two UEFI partitions on both drives, which you might identify by their sizes and filesystem (FAT32) and combine the disk identifiers (/dev/sdX) with the regarding numbers of the partitions.

       Example:

       parted -l
       Model: WD Enterprise P20691
       Disk /dev/sda: 2000GB
       Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
       Partition Table: msdos
       Disk Flags:
       
       Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
        1      1049kB  101MB   100MB   primary  fat32
        2      102MB   2000GB  1999GB  primary  ntfs
       
       Model: WD Enterprise P20691
       Disk /dev/sda: 2000GB
       Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
       Partition Table: msdos
       Disk Flags:
       
       Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
        1      1049kB  101MB   100MB   primary  fat32
        2      102MB   2000GB  1999GB  primary  ntfs

       In this case, the partitions are /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1.

     • Create mount point folders:

       mkdir /mnt/main
       mkdir /mnt/second

     • Mount the regarding UEFI System partitions (replace the partitions with your ones):

       mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/main -o rw,umask=0000
       mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/second -o rw,umask=0000

     • Next copy all files from the current UEFI System partition to the new one:

       cp -ar /mnt/main/ /mnt/second/

     • Once finished, boot the server back to the installed system:

       reboot

  3. After re-opening the Disk Management Utility (see "Preparation" section of this guide), you can add the UEFI System Volume to the mirroring as well by performing a right-click on it and choose Add mirroring from the context menu.
  4. In the appearing menu choose the preferred second drive for the RAID1 and confirm by clicking on Add mirroring.

Please ensure that all Volumes have been added to the mirroring and the synchronization is running, which is indicated by the reddish coloured Volumes and their status information.