How to protect against, and recover from, a boot failure

Hans Mabelis 1 Reputation point
2020-07-27T13:46:35.653+00:00

Rebuilding my windows system from scratch would take me several days so naturally I'm looking for a better way. (Especialy as this computer is our office server on which several people depend.)

  • A few years back I tried restoring windows (10) from a recent 'system image' on a USB-drive. That turned into a nightmare. Only after a lot of hassle did I learn that my system image was made from an old 500Gb drive and could not be restored to a new 3Tb drive. Apparently because they use different partition tables (MBR and GUID respectively). I couldn't find out how to partition the new disk the old way so I bought an old disk which was lying around in my favourite hardware store. That worked, but what do I do NOW to ensure I'll be able to use my 'system image'?
  • Up till just now I had a better experience with windows built-in mirrorring. The main problem was the lack of a guide on "How to proceed when your system drive gives a 'Redundancy failed' error". However, after much ado I was able to restore the mirror on a new drive without interrupting the system for longer then it took to replace the drive.
    BUT the same trick now seems to fail me; I get the error "All disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size, and the sector size must be valid."
    Microsoft advises to use fsutil to inspect sector size and such, but this just shows me that ALL sizes are identical for both disks. (I then read that fsutil is flawed in that it not reports the actual physical sector size...)
    Ironically, both drives are of the same size, brand and year since I bought several, years ago, precisely to avoid problems with new hardware technologies.

I've no idea what to do now. I used the new drive to make another 'system backup' on but I'm not sure I'd be able to use it in case of a boot failure.
So, please, can anyone advice me on how to proceed?

BTW, in a previous era I used hardware RAID controllers of various brands, cheap and expensive, even with built-in battery pack. I only remember they were all extremely cumbersome to work with in case of a 'boot failure'. At least once I mirrored the new (emtpy) drive onto the old (still working) boot drive. But maybe that has changed?

Windows Server Storage
Windows Server Storage
Windows Server: A family of Microsoft server operating systems that support enterprise-level management, data storage, applications, and communications.Storage: The hardware and software system used to retain data for subsequent retrieval.
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  1. Teemo Tang 11,411 Reputation points
    2020-07-28T08:59:40.767+00:00

    Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Platform.
    Look at this old thread, from the latest replies we can see that because Windows built-in Storage Spaces is a software mirror not hardware mirror, this message will always occur.
    Error - All disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size, and the sector size must be valid
    https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/dc113f43-61d9-4929-afe9-fe3536ea937d/error-all-disks-holding-extents-for-a-given-volume-must-have-the-same-sector-size-and-the-sector?forum=winserverfiles
    For your current situation, I still feel that hardware RAID is the best practice… My HP graphics workstations all configure RAID 1 by two disks, once meet boot failure, just remove one disk and check result.
    The steps are:
    1.Create system image on test computer, make sure test computer has the same hard disk(3TB). Of course you could use Symantec Ghost or Windows built-in Create a system image option.
    2.Use the system image to create an Windows installation media.
    3.Contact your computer manufacturer support for a Hardware RAID method.
    4.Configure hardware RAID then install Windows, once installation complete, two disks have the same content and boot ability.

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