Topshelf

Well here's a kicker. Turns out my NIC went bad and was crashing the system on me. Thought I'd pull the harware out 1 by 1 before reloading just to make sure it wasn't something stupid like that. Luckily, it was something very stupid. I'll pop a new one in tomorrow and hope it works now. Thanks for all the help though.

Yeah, I don't think I'll reach 35 disks anytime soon Thanks for all your help. I'm feeling better about this already. So I'm down to 3 questions before I try to fix this. 1) Do you think it's fine to use the 60 and 40's together? Or should all the drives be identical? 2) Right now I'm running 2kPro, but if I reformat and start over I want to use Advanced Server. Will this cause any new issues with recovering the spanned disks or work exactly the same. 3) Lastly, am I better off unplugging the 3 hdd's until the OS is fully configured? Or just leave everything running during setup and let it fly? Again, thanks for the help. Well I just got this off of Symantec's site. So I guess the Ghost option is out of the question now. Ghost compatibility with RAID Situation: You want to know if Ghost is compatible with RAID. Solution: Ghost is not compatible with RAID systems. That is, Symantec Ghost 6.5 and earlier do not support RAID controllers on the computers that are being imaged. Software RAID Ghost will not work with software level RAID. Hardware RAID Although it is not a supported feature, Ghost may be able to create and restore images to hardware level RAID systems as long as you are loading the appropriate DOS driver to support this. DOS drivers can usually be obtained from the RAID hardware manufacturer. [This message has been edited by Topshelf (edited 20 December 2000).]

Thanks for the replies guys. Just to clarify things some. Using the spanned dynamic disks I can potentially add as many drives as I want to the setup. It's not a typical RAID 0 setup. Also, all 3 drives are 5400RPM Maxtors. I thought that would be fine, but I do see how this could maybe lead to problems. Think if I Ghosted the 60Gig to another 40Gig it would fix things? It would have to copy the headers over too that were mentioned earlier. Not sure if that would work or not. Oh yeah, I am already running a Promise Ultra 66. All 4 drives are on it(3 spanned and the BootDisk). As of right now, I can boot into Windows and all my files are intact. So I should be able to copy them to another drive if needed. I'm thinking my 2 best options right now are most likely... 1) Ghost the 60Gig to an identical 40Gig and hope it copies the headers and any other important files needed to keep the spanned disks running. 2) Take a shot at a complete reload like Stephen mentioned and pray that it recognizes the span during setup. Neither seems like a gauruntee, but I gotta try something. Any other thoughts before I make a decision? I'm going to grab another beer and think about this some more. If I'm lucky I'll p*** out and this will all be a dream when I wake up. hehe, it edited out the word p@ss [This message has been edited by Topshelf (edited 20 December 2000).]

I have a Win2k Pro machine which has 3 Maxtor HDD's setup as 1 spanned volume. It's 2 40Gig and 1 60Gig. I just added the 60Gig and ever since I've had nothing but problems. I'm at the point now where I believe the OS is pretty much trashed. It locks up after a few minutes with 0 activity. There are other strange things too, but I'm trying to keep this short. So what I need to know is if there is anyway I can salvage my data. I want to completely format the BootDrive and reload everything. But will I end up losing all the info on those disks since they are spanned? It's not like removing a single hdd full of info is it? What can I do other than move it all to other hdd's then move it back? Any help would be appreciated as I need to get this machine back up asap.