Windows doesn't make sense

[djclark]

I have a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise (Secondary) domain controller, and the other night it crashed. (Did I mention it is running on an HP DL380 G2 with two RAID5 arrays?)

Anyways...it is also one of our (older) file servers and is in the very elongated process of having it's shares moved to our SAN/Newer File Server, but we still have probably half of our teachers and staff (70 or so people) still residing on it. When I came in yesterday morning it had completely lost it's "D" drive which held all of the shares. The array manager didn't report any problems, and I could see the disk in Disk Manager, it just wasn't connected to Windows with a drive letter. So I reconnected it as the "D" drive again and all of the data was there...but all of the file shares were gone. *que worlds smallest violin*

In fear the raid controller is dying we have now done a P to V with SCVMM and made it a Virtual Server. Also figuring that since the servers resources were "down" we went ahead and fed Windows whatever miscellaneous updates it wanted and let it reboot a couple of times. Magically afterwards all of the file shares came back, and everything was basically happy again...

So the question here is...what the heck happened do you think? O.o

[mtillbrook]

haha, different i suppose (presumably what you were thinking as well!)

It does sound like an array problem but that doesn't really explain why windows lost its shares. It is possible that one of the physical disks could be having a problem but I think that converting it to a virtual server should sort it!