[chazsconi]

Gigabit, derchris

Thanks for your responses. I have now tested out Win2003 software RAID on a virtual machine (not quite as good as a real one, but a lot simpler). I killed the 1st disk and it rebooted without a problem.

It appears that the issue with having to boot from a floppy was there in Win2000, but not in 2003.

When re-creating the mirror there is a warning "Logical Disk Manager could not update the boot file for any boot partitions on the target disk. Verify your arcpath listings in file boot.ini or through the bootcfg.exe utility", but this seems to be fine.

[derchris]

Mirror is a block by block copy.
So everything which is written to Disk a, will be mirrored to Disk b.
This will include the boot sector.

[gigabit]

When its happened to me, as long as bios will boot from the second disk if the first one fails you should be ok.

[chazsconi]

I have a dedicated Windows server with soft RAID 1 on all partitions including Windows (the default install option). The 2nd disk recently failed, and was replaced. This required a reboot and I am back up and running without data loss.

However, what would have happened if the 1st disk had failed? I have read that if this happens, Windows wont boot because although Windows itself is mirrored, the boot sector is only on the 1st disk, and MS's official solution is booting via floppy. Also, a change may be required in the BIOS to boot from the floppy or 2nd disk.

Do OVH have a way around this problem? Or will I just have to boot to rescue mode, recover my data and then re-install?

[marks]

All the SP servers are delivered with soft RAID 1 by default.

During the installation process, you can choose some other configurations though the manager will enforce to have at least the system partition in RAID1 and a minimum of 21GB.

After the installation, you can do anything you want with the drives. In Windows, you can use Disk Management and in Linux you can use mdadm to do other configurations.

[DedicatedPros]

SP servers have soft raid

[NickW]

I know there is this thread http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2247, which talks about the EG, MG and HG servers. But no mention of the SP servers. Are these hard RAID like the the other series or are they soft?