Unable to select disk from dropdown in Cluster Administrator

  • Article

Hello everybody, this time I’m going to talk about a problem that it’s not related to SQL specifically, it’s an issue that I found related with Windows Server 2003 Failover Clustering

The problem it’s that after installing a shared disk to the cluster nodes they didn’t show up on the cluster, when creating the Physical Disk resource the disks didn’t appear on the drop down list to correlate them to the cluster resource.

After putting a few key words on Bing I found an article about the issue.

Unable to select disk from dropdown in Cluster Administrator https://support.microsoft.com/kb/969053

It helped, but the solutions didn't resolve my issue, let’s review the steps for the Alternative Method:

1. The following command will create a resource of type physical disk: cluster res "Disk F:" /Create /group:"Cluster Group" /Type:"physical disk"

This step allows you to create a physical disk resource on the cluster with the name Disk F: on the Cluster Group, the resource will be offline and without specific properties

2. The next command is needed for associating the disk through its disk signature to the physical disk resource. 

  • Using decimal value for Windows 2000, 2003 and 2003 R2: cluster res "Disk F:" /priv signature=1405929673 
  • Using hexadecimal value for Windows 2000 and 2003: cluster res "Disk F:" /priv signature=0x53CCC8C
  • Using Drive letter with Windows 2000 and 2003: cluster res "Disk F:" /priv Drive="F:" 
  • Using Drive letter with Windows Server 2003 R2: cluster res "Disk F:" /priv Disk="F:

This step will associated the shared disk with the physical disk resource created on the last step through the disk signature. However when executing the command I receive the System Error 87.

So I decided to associated them directly through the registry, with the following steps:

-        Open the cluster administrator on the node for the group where you want to add the disk

-        Add the physical disk resource using cluster.exe as shown on the article. Ex: cluster res "Disk F:" /Create /group:"Cluster Group" /Type:"physical disk". The resource will be created offline

-        Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEClusterResources key locate the {GUID} for the physical disk resource you added above.

-        Under the Parameters key, ADD a DWORD value called Signature - assign it the HEX disk signature number.

-        You should now be able to bring it Online in Cluster Administrator.

This way you should be able to add disk as a resource on the cluster. This issue is uncommon and generally it appears when there some type of incompatibility with the SAN drivers. It likely that with a restart of all the cluster nodes the issue it’s also solved, but sometimes this is not an option.

You can do this using diskpart.exe to read the disk's signature.

1)      Go to a command prompt and type "diskpart".

2)      In the DISKPART> prompt, type "list disk”.

3)      In the DISKPART> prompt, type "select disk n" <- where n is the disk number you wish to view

4)      In the DISKPART> prompt, type "detail disk"

5)      The "Disk ID: " value is the disk's signature in hexidecimal format.