NW 3.12 Disks won't mirror -- HELP

[jeffkelly]

I have a single 29160 SCSI card w/ 2 37 gig Ultra 320 drives. Netware reports the following under mirroring (before creating the mirrored set):
In Sync - Netware Partition #2 on Device #0
In Sync - Netware Partition #3 on Device #1

Partition #2 contains the data, so I hit enter on partition #2 and select partition #3 from the list. The Mirrored list changes to:

After I create the mirrored set (mirroring partition #3, the Netware reports the following:

In Sync - Netware Partition #2 on Device #0
Out of Sync - Netware Partition #3 on Device #1

I checked the console and it displays the message "Remirroring partition #2"

Everything mentioned above appears to be normal and mirroring is working correctly. The problem is that 12 hours have passed since creating the mirrored set and they still aren't mirrored. I have no workstation logged into the server, so I would expect the mirroring to complete quickly -- especially since the server is a P4-2.8 gig w/512 ECC Memory and extremely fast SCSI hard drives.

I broke the mirrored set several times (after waiting 12 hours each time), deleted/recreated the NW partition on drive 1. Each time I have the same results as mentioned above.

Any ideas what may be going wrong? Also, are the partitions numbered correctly?

BTW: the server works well on a single hard drive (drive 0).

Thanks.

 

[JockMullin]

Hi, Jeff

Well, it all sounds OK, except for the fact it doesn't work (grin).

The partition numbering is logical - partition #1 would be the boot partition on drive 0, partition #2 is the netware partition on drive 0 and #3 is the netware partition allocated on drive 1.

I assume the netware partition on drive 1 is at least as large as the one on drive 0. Does the SCSI bios ID the drives properly? How big are the partitions? Are there any other SCSI devices?

Do you see any disk activity at all when mirroring is supposedly happening?

Try deleting the netware partition on drive 1 and allocate a DOS partition over there and see if you can copy the DOS partition from 0 to 1. Are you sure the drive is working OK?
Did you try running a surface scan on drive 1?

I have seen mirroring take a long time, but 12 hours on a fast system seems a bit much.

Jock

 

[marvhuffaker]

After 12 hours, what is the status? You should be able to type "MIRROR STATUS" at the console prompt.. Check this every couple hours, if it's incrementing, don't worry about it. It will eventually get there.

The last time I used 3.12 and mirroring, was with 4GB drives, and I remember they took 3-4 hours to mirror completely. With a 37gb drive, I am guessing it's normal to take quite a bit longer.

Marv

Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[jeffkelly]

Jock -

I forgot to mention that I already created a bootable DOS partition on each drive (both marked active) and a Netware partition taking the remainder of the drive. Both HDDs are identical in physical size and partition size. Because four partitions are present, I would have expected Novell to report the Netware partitions to be 2 (drive 0) and 4 (drive 1). Instead, they are being reported as 2 (drive 0) and 3 (drive 1). There is HDD activity after the mirror set is created. however I expected mirroring to complete quickly since there are no workstations logged into the server. Hence all available server resources are available to the mirroring process.

Marvin-

It looks like it is mirroring. I typed the command as you suggested and the mirror status is 94% complete and is slowly incrementing upward. I started the mirror process at 10:30p last night. So far it has taken 28 hours to get to 94%. I just hope this isn't a sign that my server is going to be a slow performer...

Thanks for the quick feedback.

Jeff

 

[jeffkelly]

The disks finally mirrored. It took roughly 18 hours to mirror the new 37 GB drive. Seems pretty slow for such a powerful machine!

 

[JockMullin]

Hi, Jeff.

Well, I agree it is slow, but ustand mirroring is a low-level operation and there is no write caching involved at that level - read a sector, write a sector, read it back, verify, next sector. Rotational latency adds up over 37 gig, I guess, even at 10000 rpm. Very little CPU involvement.

That is why most folks using large scsi drives opt for a controller-based raid solution - it all happens at the controller level and the controller buffers the operations. Mirroring is inherently slow, but for normal i/o the OS doesn't wait for the mirroring, which is left to catch up when it can.

Jock

 

[jeffkelly]

Jock,

Do you know of a raid controller that will work w/ NW3.12. Adaptec said they didn't have one. There are two important things I am concerned about w/ hardware raid:

1. NW3.12 compatible controller driver (obviously).
2. NW 3.12 compatible utility that monitors the hardware raid set and reports to NW when one of the drives goes offline. Of course, we could check the health of the raid set by rebooting the server, but that strategy isn't real-time and with our luck, we won't notice that a drive went offline until we need the mirror. That's why I went w/ the 29160N and mirrored w/ Netware.

Jeff

 

[JockMullin]

Hi, Jeff

I haven't done this myself at all recently and the hardware/drivers I used in the past are no longer current.

However, see thread 56-342954 here where it has been done though with some spurious interrupt messages. That was a Perc3 controller.

I also have heard of Tekram that support 3.12, but don't know about the software support in either case.

Almost nobody supports 3.12 any more, unfortunately.

Jock

 

[Lewmew]

I have a mirroring question in a Netware 3.12 server. Can you mirror drives of unequal size with unequal Netware partition sizes? I have a 9GB SCSI (mirrored set) withone drive looking like it may fail. It dropped out of sync, showing "device failure". After checking drive status in MONITOR, it began to remirror at 99% and synchronized a few minutes later. I want to replace one of the set with a larger drive [18GB]. It is the drive with the DOS partition and SYS volume. I assume I could make the partition sizes match and waste the rest of the drive space but would rether not unless necessary. Any thoughts?

 

[terry712]

you can use miss size drives - but the netware partition MUST be the same size - you could fudge it by using a huge hot fix area and then modifying later