Recovering from hardware failure with mirrored disks

I have (had) a Windows Server 2003 machine with software RAID -- two
hard drives, set up to mirror each other. This was done using the
default tools in Disk Management.

We had a catastrophic hardware failure overnight. As near as we can
tell, the processor or the motherboard went bad.

We built a new machine, and transferred one of the drives from the old
machine over. It was a mirrored drive, so we figured we could boot off
of it, then install the other drive and sync them back up.

It would not boot. It didn't seem to have a master boot record on it.

We installed the other drive. It did have an MBR, and would start to
boot, but it blue-screened halfway through, complaining of a
hardware-related failure.

We installed a brand new drive and re-installed Windows.

Then we took one of the old drives, installed it as a second drive, and
were happy to find all our data safe and sound.

So, two questions:

1. Using the mirroring feature of Windows, should I expect two bootable
drives? It looks like the boot partition was only on one of the
drives. Should I have done something differently to ensure both drives
could boot?

2. As for the blue screen mentioned above, we're suspecting it's
because the Windows installation on the recovered drive was trying to
boot onto an unknown machine. Its "home" was a two-year old machine,
and it was suddenly asked to "wake up" on a freshly built machine with
wildly different hardware components. Was it unreasonable to expect
Windows to boot? I guess I figured it would adapt to its new
environment, but now I wonder if this was unrealistic.

Deane

.

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