18.06.2018.
How to protect Windows from problems caused by hard drive corruption? To do this, there is a backup mechanism, in particular, one with the automatic creation of incremental or differential backups to maintain the current state of the OS. But there is an alternative solution - Windows system partition mirroring performed by its own standard means.
This is software creation. RAID in configuration RAID 1 in order to preserve information and gain access to the OS environment in case of problems caused by problems with the hard disk that ensures its existence. What are the features of this mechanism, and how to implement it in the Windows environment - we will talk about all this in detail below.
Mirroring- this, as mentioned, is software RAID 1 , a commonly used disk array configuration in which data is duplicated on a second hard disk called a mirror. If there is a problem with the first, main hard drive, we can use the mirror to access our valuable information. Moreover, if mirroring is applied to Windows system partitions, if the main disk fails, we will not only get access to the information stored in the system, we will even get inside it. Not inside the original one, but inside its exact clone on the mirror disk.
Software implementation RAID 1 possible under dynamic disk technology. This technology exists in the Windows environment, starting from the version 2000 . The technology itself is applicable to MBR-, so to GPT-disks, but here is the creation of software RAID 1 complicated by the need for additional operations with the command line. So everything that will be proposed below applies only to MBR-disks. Creation of software RAID only possible in OS editions starting from Pro.
When reinstalling a system on dynamic disks, you do not need to introduce specific drivers into the distribution RAID-controller, as required for hardware RAID. As well as you do not need to reinstall anything when using any of the software configurations. RAID. However, in the conditions of working with dynamic disks, we will not be able to use more than one Windows. OSes installed on other partitions simply won't boot. Technology works according to the rule "Entrance - ruble, exit - two": the original basic disks with the structure and data of Windows are converted into a dynamic type easily and simply, but the reverse direction works only for disks with an unallocated area. If there is a structure and data, you will have to resort to third-party software.
Another important nuance: to work with this technology, it is important that the computer name contains only Latin characters. Otherwise we get an error "Invalid package name".
For application to Windows software RAID 1 a second hard disk with a capacity of at least the total volume of both system partitions must be connected to the computer. In our case, they occupy, respectively, 549 MB And 60 GB, and the disk-mirror has a volume with a small margin - 70 GB. The mirror must be prepared for its further fate - to delete all sections on it. There should be a clean unallocated area.
Information about loading Windows installed on other partitions, if any, is better to remove and leave the ability to start only the current system. When mirroring, the boot menu will be overwritten, and it will contain a record of loading only one OS with the addition of the ability to run its clone on the mirror disk. So it is important that there is a record of downloading the required Windows. Otherwise we get BSOD .
We will implement mirror Windows using the system utility diskmgmt.msc she's a console "Disk Management".
On any of the two disks, we call the context menu, select their conversion to dynamic type.
We tick both of them. click "OK".
We press "Convert" and confirm the action.
So, both disks - both the main and the mirror - are now dynamic. We call the context menu on a small technical section of the system (boot section) . Choose "Add Mirror".
Click on the mirror disk. We press "Add Mirror Volume".
After that, we will see how a clone partition was formed on the mirror and the data synchronization process started.
Now we press the context menu on the main Windows partition, on the disk WITH . And we do the same operation as above. Adding a mirror.
Now we have configured data synchronization with the mirror. We can dispose of the unallocated area remaining on the mirror disk as we please: leave it as it is, create a separate partition from it, attach the space to some other partition (and on any of the disks, because we are now working with their dynamic type) .
As soon as the data is synchronized with the mirror, and we learn about the completion of this process by the degree of disk load in the task manager, we can reboot and test the performance of mirror Windows. Access to it, as mentioned, will appear in the bootloader menu, it will be listed with the inscription "Windows such and such a version is a secondary plex" . The bootloader menu, by the way, in the last two versions of the OS can be configured right at the stage of starting the computer.
You can set a shorter time for Windows autoselect.
The system on the main disk will boot first, so you can choose the minimum 5 second to display download options.
In older versions of Windows, the timeout for the bootloader menu is configured in the system utility "System configuration".
If Windows mirroring is no longer needed, its mirror can be removed. This is done in the same place where this mirror was added - in the utility diskmgmt.msc. In turn, click on each of the system partitions, in the context menu, click "Remove Mirror".
Select the mirror disk, press the delete button and confirm.
The mirror disk space will turn into undistributed area, and its type is converted from dynamic to the original base.
Reinstalling Windows under the conditions of the existence of mirrors of its partitions is carried out in the same way as usual - we can delete its two partitions and indicate the unallocated area as the OS installation location, or we can simply format its two existing partitions.
In any of these cases, when you reinstall Windows, its mirror will not go anywhere, it will continue to function in the new system. Program RAID 1 migrated to a new, reinstalled system environment. And everything would be fine if we mirrored the usual user sections with our data. But software RAID 1 for system partitions, remember, it also provides the ability to enter Windows on a mirror disk. And here we are faced with another jamb of Microsoft: the record about the loading of the mirror system will be lost - the same menu item of the bootloader with the addendum "secondary plex" . After all, we formatted or deleted a small bootloader partition when installing the system. Leaving it as it is, not formatting it is even more dangerous. Recall that only one Windows can be loaded on dynamic disks. If the bootloader partition is not formatted, the new system will be listed second in the boot menu and will not be able to start. Just as neither the first system nor its mirror will start, because the first one no longer exists, and its mirror is a clone of non-existent Windows.
So the Windows boot partition when reinstalling it must be either formatted or deleted. How then to provide an input in mirror Windows? The solution here is very simple: you need to recreate the mirrors of system partitions - delete them, as discussed in the previous paragraph, and assign them again. The mirror disk is re-synchronized with the system partitions, and the mirror system item with an addition will again appear in the Windows bootloader menu "secondary plex".
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Read about the Windows "Disk Space" feature. Namely, how to create a software Raid from several physical disks on your home PC, including built-in or connected via USB, using this function, and recover data from it.
The built-in Storage Spaces feature in Windows 10 gives the user the ability to create one virtual hard drive from several hard drives. With its help, you can back up data by duplicating it on multiple drives or combine multiple hard or SSD drives into a single storage pool. Storage Spaces is the same as RAID, only on a desktop computer and with hard drives connected to it.
Content:This feature first appeared in Windows 8 and has been enhanced in Windows 10. Storage Spaces is available in all versions of Windows 8 and 10, including Home.
To create Storage Space, you must have at least two physical drives connected to your computer, including built-in or USB-connected drives.
Using the Storage Spaces feature, you can create a storage pool of two or more physical disks by grouping them together. After creating a storage pool of two or more physical disks, you can create three types of resiliency spaces:
Create Disk space You can use the corresponding menu in .
But before you start creating it, connect to the computer all the hard drives from which you intend to create disk space. Then select from the menu / Create a new pool and disk space.
Select the disks you want to add to the pool and click the button "Create Pool".
Keep in mind that all data on the disks from which the disk space is created will be deleted.
After creating the pool, you need to set up a new disk space: give it a name and select a drive letter. It is with this name and letter that it will be displayed in Windows.
Also, you can choose the standard Windows file system - NTFS, or a new type of system ReFS. In the case of creating a mirror or parity space, which are designed to protect data from loss, it is better to choose the ReFS system type.
Specify the type of stability: Simple (no stability), double sided mirror, three way mirror, Parity.
To create a large storage pool without disk failure protection, select the type Simple(no stability). A two-way mirror involves storing two copies of the data on disk, and tripartite- three. Disk space with type Parity will protect in case of failure of one of the disks, and will be larger than a two- or three-way mirror, but will be much slower.
Depending on the type of resiliency selected, the wizard will set the maximum amount of disk space currently available. But, you can also set a larger data pool size. This is intended for the case when the available capacity of the connected physical disks is full. So that the user can connect another disk without having to make changes to the disk space configuration.
After that click "Create Disk Space".
The created disk space will appear as another disk in the folder "This Computer". Such a disk will have the name and letter that you assigned to it during creation and will not visually differ from other disks in any way.
With this disk, you can do everything the same as with another ordinary disk. Even encrypt it with Bitlocker.
After creating the disk space, you can go back to Control Panel to manage or customize it.
You can create another disk space. Their number is limited only by the number of physical disks connected to the computer. You can add disks or rename the storage pool.
You can change the name or letter of the disk space by clicking the menu "Change" in the subsection.
To add drives to an existing storage space, select Add Drives and select the drives you want to add. By selecting the Optimize Disk Usage menu, Windows will redistribute existing data evenly across all drives.
If the existing disk space consists of three or more physical disks, then one of them can be deleted. To do this, expand the physical disks menu and select the link "Prepare for removal", next to the drive you want to remove. In our case, there is no such link, since the disk space consists of two disks.
After that, the system will transfer the data from the removed disk to two (or more) other physical disks of the disk space. As a result the link "Prepare for removal" will change to "Delete".
The physical disk removed from disk space will become available in Disk Manager. To be able to work further, you may need to create a new partition on it and format it.
In the management of disk spaces, the user also has the option of deleting the disk space itself (to the right of the disk space name, subsection ). Just keep in mind that all data of the deleted disk space will be deleted.
If the disk space is removed, the menu will become available. "Delete Pool", which you can select to completely remove the storage pool.
What to do in case of data loss from disk space? Is it possible to restore them?
If one or more disks of disk space fail, the process of recovering data from it becomes very complicated and cannot be reduced to scanning each disk individually with a data recovery program. In this case, the data will not be restored or will be restored damaged.
The only exception is the mirrored storage space, which is created as RAID-1. Since in a disk space of this type, a copy of the data is created on each of the disks.
To do this, just scan the logical drive, in which the disk space is displayed, using Hetman Partition Recovery. Then find and recover lost files or folders in the same way as from any other disk.
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the Storage Spaces feature has appeared in Windows since version 8. But before that, the system also provided the ability to create storage spaces. You can create a mirrored, striped, or spanned volume in Windows 7 or older using the Disk Management menu.
Because Disk Management is present in Windows 8 / 10, then in the same way you can create disk space in the latest versions of the system.
To create storage space using Disk Management, you need two or more disks connected to your computer, which will be unallocated. If a partition is created on the disk from which you plan to create a mirrored volume, delete it. To do this, right-click on it and select "Delete Volume...". Keep in mind that this will remove all data from the disk.
After that, again right-click on the disk from which the disk space is supposed to be created, and depending on the task, select the type of volume to be created. They are somewhat similar to the Storage Spaces resiliency types described in the first part of this article.
So, simple volume is a part of a physical disk that functions as a separate physical unit. This is nothing more than a regular logical partition of a physical disk. It is not disk space in the sense that we are talking about in this article.
Composite volume connects free space areas of two or more physical hard drives into one logical drive. It consists of at least two unallocated parts on two hard drives, which, when created, are combined into one common one. If you create a spanned volume that includes 150 GB from one and 250 GB from another hard drive, then a 400 GB local drive will appear in the This PC folder. The performance of a spanned volume is higher than that of a simple volume, and the fault tolerance is the same. Creating a spanned volume is suitable for resolving the issue of local disk space.
Striped Volume is an array configuration with no redundancy. The information is divided into data blocks and written to several disks at the same time. The failure of any disk leads to the destruction of the entire array. Since the array is not redundant, there is no recovery procedure in the event of a single physical disk failure. Reliability depends on the reliability of each of the disks. The array is not designed to store data reliably, but to improve performance.
Mirror volume is the same as the mirror space. It is designed to protect data in case of a possible failure of a physical disk by saving multiple copies of files. If one of the physical disks of the space fails, the data stored on it will remain available from the other disk on which they were copied. This type is useful for protecting important data in the event of possible hardware failures.
RAID-5 volume, as well as an even space, a cross between a simple and a mirror type. Data is written striped across multiple physical disks, producing one or two copies of the parity information. However, due to the need to calculate checksums, parity space is noticeably slower to write, which is why they are recommended for storing data archives. For example, photo or video. To create it, you need three or more disks.
I choose " Create Mirrored Volume…” and in the Image Creation Wizard that appears, click "Further".
Select the drive you want to add before the mirrored volume (other than the one you originally right-clicked on) and click "Add" / "Further".
Assign a drive letter.
Give the volume a name and format it.
Before formatting begins, the system will warn you that it will convert the basic disks selected for creating the mirrored volume to dynamic.
This will start formatting and converting disks to a mirror volume. In the Disk Management window, the disks of the mirrored volume will appear in brown, and in the This PC folder, as one of the local disks.
In this article, I will give an overview of the possibilities for organizing RAID arrays using the built-in tools of Windows Server and detail what pitfalls you may encounter when creating and operating such arrays.
The following arrays are supported:
RAID arrays can only be created on dynamic disks, a special layout of physical disks (understood only by Windows) that has the following features:
You can only create RAID volumes of one type (level) on one group of physical disks. For example, if we have 3 physical disks and we have created a RAID5 volume on them without taking up all the space. We will not be able to create volumes of another RAID level (RAID0 and RAID1) in free space, but only RAID5 and simple volumes.
If several RAID volumes are created on the same disk group, then in the event of any failure after the computer boots, they begin to be restored at the same time. This is a fierce, frenzied EPIC FAIL! A simple situation: there are two physical disks, two RAID1 volumes are created on them, one for the operating system, the other for data.
Such a scheme works remarkably well until the first failure (the simplest types are a sudden power outage or a blue screen). And then comes the horror. The operating system boots up and starts synchronizing both RAID1 volumes at the same time. Thus, physical disks receive competing commands for intensive sequential operations in three different physical areas at once. At the same time, the mechanics of disks wear out wildly, the cache is useless.
From the outside, this “fail-safety” looks like this: the overall performance of the disk subsystem drops every 20 times, the OS itself will boot either after synchronization of one of the volumes (15 minutes, if it is small, 50 gigs), or after 20 minutes and will be useless until end of synchronization of one of the volumes.
I consider the above behavior to be an unacceptable architectural miscalculation on Microsoft's part, and I'm surprised that this problem hasn't been fixed since the introduction of software RAID in Windows 2000 Server.
If you find yourself in the described situation, then you should not wait for the OS to load and the disks to wear out.
I will describe a scenario in which you will not be able to restore a degraded RAID5 array to a healthy state, even if all the conditions for this are provided.
There is nothing to do but copy the data that is still being read and rebuild the entire array.
Not wanting to admit defeat, I tried the following things:
The hardware-software implementation of the RAID controller, known as Intel Matrix Storage, and recently renamed Intel Rapid Storage (works on RAID versions of chipsets, such as ICH9R, ICH10R), is spared from the above disadvantages. Intel hardware-software RAID provides many of the benefits of "grown-up" RAID controllers:
Its main disadvantage, in contrast to fully hardware RAID controllers, is "software", which implies:
There are situations when a hard drive fails (due to voltage problems, physical wear and tear, and so on) and it turns out that the information accumulated over the years is irretrievably lost (you can contact data recovery specialists, but as a rule it costs a lot of money and even not the fact that the information can be recovered) and therefore, in order to rid myself of such fears, I decided to set up a RAID1 mirrored redundancy system, which I will talk about in this video tutorial.
In general, I will devote 2 lessons to this topic, in this we will consider configuring RAID1 through the BIOS, and in the next configuring RAID1 programmatically using Windows 7.
And so, what is RAID in general, the abbreviation itself stands for an independent array of inexpensive disks and in general there are quite a few varieties of RAIDs, these are RAID 0,1,5,10, but in this video we will analyze the most common RAID1 or mirror RAID.
What is the essence of RAID1, let's say you have 2 identical hard drives, they are combined into RAID1, and the operating system sees these two drives as one physical and when you write any information to this drive, it is duplicated on both drives, it turns out like would mirror the information on both drives.
And if one of them fails, all information is stored on the second disk, and by replacing the failed disk with a similar one, the mirror redundancy system is restored.
I would like to say right away that setting through the BIOS is more reliable, but also more complicated and, perhaps, suitable for setting up on redundancy servers, at home it will be enough to configure the mirrors programmatically.
Well, now let's move on to the direct configuration of RAID1 through the BIOS, since it will not be possible to record this video from the screen, the configuration is not done through Windows, then some screen screenshots will be of poor quality, but here the point is not in quality but in the usefulness of this information.
First, we go into the BIOS, for me it looks like this. In different models of motherboards, the setting may differ, but the principle is the same. We need to find the configuration menu for SATA or IDE devices, I have this menu in Advanced \ SATA Configuration \ Here in the menu SATA mode, select RAID, save changes and exit the BIOS.
The computer is rebooting and at startup, before trying to boot the operating system, a message appears, I have this Press Ctrl + I to enter the RAID configuration utility, run the utility.
This window displays the following information
The presence of a RAID - since I have not created it yet, therefore the inscription is not defined here, i.e. RAID is not
The serial number of the device, I have 2 of them
Hard disk model (it is advisable to use disks of the same manufacturer and brand so that they are absolutely identical)
The volume of each disk (the volume must be the same on both disks, otherwise creating a mirrored RAID will not work)
And the status, since the RAID has not yet been created, the status is not in the RAID array
In addition to the status table, there is also a menu that consists of the following items:
Creating a RAID array
Removing a RAID array
Resetting all drives to a non-RAID state (if there are multiple RAIDs, all RAIDs will be deleted)
I did not use the following two points at this stage, so I can’t say anything about them.
We enter the name of the RAID, I will call it Mirror, which means mirror, then in the device manager it is under this name that this disk drive will be displayed with us.
Now, in the information about RAID arrays, there is a RAID named Mirror, Type RAID1, with a capacity of 931.5 GB, the status is normal and it can be bootable.
If you want it to have an operating system, then install the OS on it. Moreover, when I experimented, my operating system was on another disk, and after creating a mirrored RAID array, the operating system stopped loading. Those. when loading, a blue screen fell out, so if you have an OS on another disk, you should first create a RAID, and then install the OS so that all drivers are installed correctly!
After starting the OS, we go to the device manager \ Disk drives and see the Mirror storage device there, i.e. this is the RAID1 mirror disk.
After disconnecting one of the disks, the following message appears at boot with the RAID status Degraded (Degraded, i.e. one of the disks is missing in the RAID), but regardless of this, the operating system continues to load.
Now I booted from a failed RAID, this can be seen using a special program that comes with the drivers on the motherboard.
Now I reconnect the disk and the RAID state goes to Rebuild (reconstruction, in this state, data from the mirror is copied to the connected disk in order to restore the RAID, depending on the size of the disk, this process can take a long time)
We load the OS and again look through the program to see what happens with the RAID, everything is OK, the raid is restored, and reconstruction is performed with the installed disk. After completing this process, everything will work as before.
Again, before experimenting with RAID, it's better to save important information to another medium, just in case!
As for the advantages and disadvantages of this system:
The cost of 1 GB is 2 times higher (since you will need to purchase 2 disks to store the same amount of information)
High fault tolerance (although there are such failures in which all the hardware burns out, but there’s no way to protect yourself, except perhaps to store a copy of documents on a dedicated server) But, again, if the system is implemented on a backup server, then if everything burns down, then in any case, copies of documents should remain at the workstations, well, unless all the computers in office J have burned down
Hardware RAID (software RAID is created by software, no software is bug-proof, so RAID via BIOS is more reliable)
