How to replace a disk that is on a Windows 2000 or a Windows 2003 server cluster

This article discusses how to replace a shared hard disk that is on a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or a Windows 2000 server cluster.

Windows server clusters are dependent on the disk signatures of the drives that are on the shared bus. The disk may be a single hard disk or, more typically, a hardware array. When the cluster service starts, it scans the shared disk looking for disk signatures that match those in the cluster registry. Drive letters are not used to track disks on a server cluster. When the cluster service starts, it tries to bring the Physical Disk resources in the cluster online. These physical disks are tracked by using the disk signatures. If the cluster service cannot find a disk that matches the disk signature in the cluster registry, the following event may appear in the system log of your Event Viewer:

Event ID: 1034
Source: ClusDisk
Description: The disk associated with cluster disk resource %DriveLetter% could not be found. The expected signature of the disk was %Disk Signature%.

If the signature of the quorum disk changes, the cluster service does not start. The disk signature can change in a variety of ways. For example:

• An existing disk on the shared bus failed and was replaced with a new disk.
• An existing disk on the shared bus was low on disk space and was replaced with a larger disk.
• A utility such as an array management, multipath, or file system tool was run and changed the disk signature.
• An array on the shared bus was reconfigured.

In previous versions of Windows server clusters, the process of restoring a failed disk to an online state was more complex. In Microsoft Windows Server 2003, the ClusterRecovery utility speeds the process of restoring a failed hard disk on the shared bus. This utility is also ported (backported) to Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. This utility is included with the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. To obtain this utility, visit the following Microsoft Web site: You can also use this utility to replace the Dumpcfg utility on Windows 2000-based server clusters. Or you can use Dumpcfg can with either Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003. For more information about how to use the Dumpcfg utility, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For additional information about how to use the ClusterRecovery tool to recover a shared cluster disk, including the quorum disk, view the ClusterRecovery.chm help file that is included with the ClusterRecovery.exe program.

Note The ClusterRecorery utility does not correctly replace disks in the Japanese Version of Windows Server 2003. For more information about the problem, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information about how to replace a disk in a Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 server cluster, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: