So I downloaded the free version of Starwind to setup a virtual CDP drive for hosting the roaming profiles and redirected folders on my network. I had created a virtual CDP device and target on my media server (windows 8 pro), and then initiated the drive on my server 2012 machine. From there I setup a share and migrated all the user profiles and redirected folders into there and it was working pretty well. Then I discovered that the software I had been using to backup the aforementioned data wasn't actually backing up anything that had restrictive NTFS permissions. This meant that pretty much all the user data that I just put on the virtual drive was the only recent copy available.
In light of that, I decided to try to make a RAID-1 array with the virtual drive I created before. I offlined the share from the server, removed the device from the previously made target and added it to a new one on the windows 8 machine. Then on the server I used the Starwind SCSI initiator to create a new RAID-1 array using the CDP device with the user data on it as the primary, and created a new secondary CDP device on the server for the new mirror. The documentation I read said the primary drive would always be used as the "master", so I manually synchronized them to bring the new mirror up to speed.
After a few hours that finished and I went to go add the new device to the server and it won't allow me to initialize it without formatting the array, and it also doesn't show any partition information when I bring the drive online. From there I tried creating a new cloned device of the most recent snapshot of the user data being used in the RAID array. That completed, and again I tried to bring the drive online and it still won't allow me to do so without formatting the device.
So.. where did I go wrong? At this point, all I really care about is finding a way to get the data out of the CDP. I've tried mounting it and copying it in several different ways and it all ends in bringing the drive online and it needs a format to initialize it. The most recent clone I made of a snapshot is online on the server, and shows a healthy partition but it comes up as a "Storage Spaces Protective Partition" with no way to assign a drive letter.
In hindsight the first thing I should have made a backup before I started screwing around with this stuff, but I didn't and now I'm between a rock and a hard place.
Any help would be very appreciated!!
