Windows Error While Mirroring Disk

Software mirroring is the solution to avoid Data Recovery that allows us to continue working in the events like disk failure. The procedure involves making identical copies of data, except for root disk. Each set of data contains a cloned copy of itself that can be used to restore data when system faces data loss issues.

When the disk has been configured as dynamic and contains sectors that can’t be read by system, mirroring may fail. These are logical bad sectors. Bad sectors can be physical too that lead to hardware level corruption. Such symptoms cause an error while it encounters such bad sectors in an attempt of creating new mirror volume or adding a mirror to an already existing volume:

“Logical Disk Manager

Operation aborted due to disk I/O error.”

The error is specific to Windows 2000 and Server 2003. System event log receives some messages, posted by DMIO. In such cases, system can’t read or write from bad sectors as they get aborted by file system. Use of chkdsk with /F /R switches on volume, in effect, locates and recovers readable information and marks such sectors as bad. However when it comes to DMIO, it doesn’t take bad marks of sectors in consideration. It performs sector-wise copying of source disk to destination and returns the specified error message if fails. It’s due to the reason that DMIO works below the file system. Bad sectors can exist on destination or source disk.

o dmio.sys (for Disk Manager Input Output) is a driver file, located at the following location:

Drive Letter:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\

Resolution

We need to remove logical bad blocks. So we can back up all data and then format the affected disk. We can then restore the data and attempt mirroring the disk. Data backup must be performed with care. If process is inefficient, the backed up copy will fail to restore require information. In such cases, Data Recovery Software are the tools that can recover lost data.

Data Recovery applications are used when user loses information and doesn’t have any valid backup. These applications are considered as safe due to read-only design. They offer interactive interface and so applications are quite easy to use. These software are viable for recovery in all logical data loss cases.