RE: Windows 2003 Mirror and Boot Partition

I have managed to get rid of the old 18GB drives and have the system booting
on the two new drives. I found a tool to re-create the boot partition table
so SCSI ID 0 is now able to boot on its own. SCSI ID 1 was the mirror but is
now broken.

I can boot to either disk using the boot ini that was created with bootcfg

However, Disk Admin reports the disk as follows:

Disk0 (SCSI ID 0) F: (System) rest of the disk is unformated.

Disk1 (SCSI ID 1) C: (Boot) D: (Paging File)

Since F is assigned to this system drive I can't delete it, or change the
drive letter which hoses up a network drive.

At this point my mirror does not exist.

I read in a KB that I could move the mirror drive to SCSI ID 0 and boot with
a FT Disk pinting to that drive - then delete the other partition (F:) and
recreate my mirror set. Along the way I could active the moved mirrored
drive to allow it boot with out a FT disk.

Well, I can't delete the F drive - all that happens is that the Disk0 shows
as C: (Boot) D: (Paging File) and then Disk1 is F: (System)

I can't activate the moved drive to be the boot device, and thus am required
to keep the FT Disk in the floppy drive to boot to my SCSI ID 0 drive - disk0.

I can remove the the drive reporting as F: and boot from the floppy and
everthing works just like it is supposed to even the F drive is mapped the
proper network drive that would not connect earlier.

So...
1) I have a disk in SCSI ID 0 now that Ideally I would like to make bootable
instead of using a FT Boot Disk.

2) I would also like to delete any reference to this other system disk.

Even booting without the disk physically present in the server, Disk Admin
still shows that the missing volume is (system) - attempting to delete it
generates an error telling me I can't delete the system disk.

Please help...!

My thought process was - why not just make the disk I booted to bootable on
its own, delete the other disk and recreate the whole mirror set and
everything.

J




"Smurfman" wrote:

I created a mess for myself by doing the following:

On a system with 2 18GB mirrored drives there was a windows 2000 server
install.
SCSI ID 0
SCSI ID 1

I wanted to install windows 2003 on a fresh pair of SCSI Drives
SCSI ID 4
SCSI ID 5

So I booted to my windows 2003 server, standard CD rom and proceeded to
perform a fresh install of W2K3 on SCSI ID 4 a new 73 GB drive.

The install went great, created my mirror set (soft mirror)

*** I went wrong by leaving the original SCSI drives in place, since the
boot info was written there (boot.ini) ntldr, and ntdetect.com

So I thought, hey no problem, copy the files, modify the boot.ini to include
my drives at SCSI ID 0 adn SCSI ID 1 and reboot.

Can't reboot - figured I must be missing a partition table entry MBR or
something.

I read a KB article to use Recovery Console and the fixboot tool.

I did this, it created a boot ini for the locaiton etc etc.

Rebooted - still can't boot.

I put all the drives back to where they below, now the primary mirror can't
boot, but the "secondary plex" as was in the boot.ini

I rebooted also tried the recovery console and the fixmbr

This did not make a difference...

-- So the long and short of things is that I have a machine that has all the
boot info on the SCSI ID 0 (drive letter g:) and a boot.ini that points SCSI
ID 4 and SCSI ID 5

-- SCSI ID 4 - can't boot - I figure it is still missing a partition table
entry for the OS
-- SCSI ID 5 - boots just fine

??? - How can I remove the old 18GB drive from the system, move the drive
pair at SCSI ID 4 adn SCSI ID 5 to slots 0 and 1 and rebuild the boot info to
boot to the drives with out needing the old drive for booting?

Thanks
J
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Boot Problem
    ... Was either disk set up as a Microsoft dynamic disk? ... Do not change the boot sector signature. ... I ensure all OK by swapping over drives. ... installing XP as it insisted there was no drive to install itself on! ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: NTLDR is missing
    ... Make sure that there are no disks in any removable drives when you boot. ... NTLDR is missing, why does it happen? ... Computer hard disk drive is not properly setup in BIOS. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: [SLE] Problems with initrd after mkinitrd
    ... A disk can have three real heads and report a dozen or a hundred! ... > natural metric for partitioning drives that use LBA. ... > - One, less frequent, is the failure of some of the cloned drives to boot ...
    (SuSE)
  • Re: Grub hangs - two hard drives and a CD
    ... > What you wrote is all based on a wrong assumption that grub numbers drives ... > that the BIOS will call to boot an OS. ... The Bios calls to read disk require the register DL to ...
    (comp.os.linux.setup)
  • Re: cant boot from mirrored boot drive
    ... No, my disk is not exactly the same, it's same size etc etc but the other disk is about a year old, I can't get and identicle disk any more, it's discontinued. ... If the disk containing the primary partition fails you will have to create a fault tolerant boot floppy to recover the installation. ... Do I break the mirror, shutdown and remove the good boot disk rdiskand just leave the disk that doesn't want to boot in and boot to the recovery conole to check it out? ... They are sata drives, drive 0 and drive 1 on the main system board's controller. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.general)