Its not clear on how to do this in 2012

Do you just run Disk Management, convert the disks to dynamic, then right click on the disk partion System Reserved and select Add Mirror, and then right click on the second partion, (C:) and add select Add mirror for that one?

This is on a Windows 2012 system NOT windows 2008.  I see lots of people pointing people to windows 2008 kb's and docs and unless Microsoft has cleared these for 2012, they really have no bearing...

You can still use dynamic disks in 2012 or take advantage of the new storage spaces feature and set up fault tolerant virtual disks.  

With Dynamic disks--How?  I can't find anything written for 2012 as to how to do this.  Just go into disk manager?   What about the system reserverd--does this need to be mirrored as well?  What about MBR's on the fault tolerant disk...will the OS be able to find it and boot to it on failure of 0:?

Use disk manager in computer management snap-in: it did not change since 2008 so you all articles describing procedure on 2008 server er still valid in 2012 version. I'm not sure if the boot drive can mirrored, but give

How do I mirror the System Reserved?  It won't let me.  The system reserved has the MBR to actually boot the system up I believe.

• Edited by ShoppingCart Tuesday, November 25, 2014 12:16 AM

you can't mirror it. software raid is handled by the OS so you can't use it for partition containig boot record

You can mirror it.

The error: All disks holding
extents for a given volume must have the same sector size, and the sector size
must be valid. 

This problem is due to the fact the disk drive technology is different. This is a 2012 problem that didn't exist in 2008.

Hi,

As you said we will need to manually edit BCD for a mirror system when we need to boot into the second hard disk.

Here is a thread I replied earlier:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/48fdbff9-de54-4e82-972f-7cfd8385b7b4/windows-server-2012-software-raid1-of-system-volume?forum=winserver8gen

Please see if it could help. 

Shaon Shan I have no idea what you are talking about an I'm not following your post here or in the other thread either????  Are you saying the mirror that Microsoft holds out via the disk manager is "not authentic" and there are "additional and hidden" steps that have to be performed beyond the obvious GUI?

Hi all,

I spend some time on creating a mirrored Windows 2012 system and here is the result.

@codeaholic: thank you for the question which made me redo the test after 1 year. At the time I post in previous thread, I noticed that some customers cannot boot into the mirrored system so I tried to manually add BCD entries to recreate the boot-up information. 

This time I created a virtual machine in Hyper-V and installed Windows 2012. Added a new hard disk and create mirror for both System Reserved drive and Drive C. Here is the picture 1:

After resynching, I reboot the computer and I can see 2 boot-up entries now:

And I tried to boot into "secondary plex" and it could be boot-up just fine. 

So the steps should still be the same - we just need to add mirror in Windows 2012 - if any issue occurs which related to BCD, you can still refer to my previous thread to manually edit with BCDedit. 

Ok, so you are saying the key is I need to see the secondary plex "option" during bootup...
Everything I've read related to the BCDedit I thought was related to GPT drives and MBR drives.

Hi,

In my test I simple right click on Disk 0 and choose Add Mirror for both System Reserved and Drive C. After syncing it is working like I mentioned - no need to add BCD entries and "Windows Server 2012 - secondary plex" is already there. 

Ok thanks.

Oh no, I deleted the secondary plex because I thought it was a duplicate installation. Now I need to figure out how to undo that, if I revert to before I removed it, will it still be in place or will I need to start from scratch to redo the RAID?

Please help!

• Edited by JD just learning 4 hours 52 minutes ago