Here's an oddity: Server 2003, set up as a DC in a little test forest with
no other DCs, has lost track of about 30 gigabytes of information contained
in 6 partitions on the second (IDE) hard drive in the system.
Now, 4 of those partitions are clones of partitions on the primary drive,
all of which contain operating systems, and one of which is a clone of the
Server 03 partition.
I just discovered this. It wasn't happening the first couple weeks after
the second drive was installed. 03 saw all of the partitions with their
labels and their drive letters and data in both Explorer and Disk
Management.
In Explorer, the partitions simply don't show up. In disk management,
however, I see all the partitions. The disk is shown to be online (it's
basic) and all the partitions are marked healthy, but they have no labels
and they have no drive letters. All the partitions are, however, shown to
be the correct size and to be formatted with the correct file system. But
none of the programs or data is recognized - all the partitions are shown to
have all the space available. And this includes the partitions that have
only data and no OS on them.
Rescanning the disks had no effect.
I haven't had much chance to look into this yet, except that a quick scan of
the event logs seemed to show that at one time 03 was trying to replicate
Sysvol on the first drive to the Sysvol on the second drive, as if it
thought this were another DC in the domain. That seems as if it might have
something to do with the problem, but I haven't followed up yet. Nor have I
checked DNS configuration,
Has anyone run into this? I have had, and know others who have had,
multiple partitions (clones) of the same server OS set up as DCs under NT
and 2000 and have not come across this kind of problem.
But maybe there's a simpler cause that I'm simply overlooking. What really
seems odd is that it fails to see the data, the labels and the drive letters
on all the partitions on the second drive, not just the one that's a clone
of itself. And, of course, that it is correct about the other info
concerning the partitions.
The other OSs on the computer, 2000, 2000 Server and XP Pro, have no such
problem, even though copies of their SYSVOLs exist on the second drive as
well.
Any ideas?
TIA
Mike