Cluster Disk Error and Partition Recovery

Microsoft Windows 2000 family of server products supports running clustering service. Thus servers running cluster service and connected into server clusters are able to balance load and provide high availability of required services and back-end applications. These servers can also give failover support and data integrity for such services and applications. The clusters appear as sole highly available systems to the users. The members of cluster are referred as cluster nodes and the supported number of nodes is dependent upon storage connection method and Windows version.

Shared cluster disk must contain all NTFS partitions or else few issues can be encountered. In such cases, when a cluster disk is online to one cluster node, other nodes should not access the same disk at same time. However, if other nodes become able to access it, this could result in issues like disk corruption. In addition, few error messages are encountered as:

"The file or directory X:$Mft is corrupt and unreadable. lease run the Chkdsk utility."

Or

"Event ID 26

System Process - Lost Delayed-Write Data

The system was attempting to transfer file data from buffers to DeviceHarddisk#Partition#. The write operation failed, and only some of the data may have been written to the file."

In order to determine if these error messages have generated due to presence of non-NTFS partition, we can use Diskmap tool. This tool helps knowing the partition IDs and that should be 0x07 for NTFS partition. If user calculates any partition other than of ID 0x07 then the corresponding partition needs to be deleted.

It is recommended to backup all non-NTFS partitions before deleting to avoid Partition Recovery in near future. After backing up all required information, we need to check backup log report status. Also, it is required to check if backup contains all required files.

Partition Recovery

If partition backup fails to give required results due to media corruption or partial backup, Partition Recovery Software can help. These are the applications designed to scan and recover lost, missing, deleted or damaged partitions. Partition Recovery utilities are safe as well as user friendly applications.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is renowned Partition Recovery Software that uses the most powerful scanning algorithms to recover data. The application supports FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 file systems. It has a graphically rich user interface plus safe recovery and restoration options. We can use this Partition Recovery application with Windows Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000.