Re: sbs2003 and mirrored drive failure. Help!



Do you have something like Ghost 2003 available (for imaging the server or
workstations)? If so, you may be able to get around this by:

(this is off the top of my head, so anyone else feel free to comment):

+ Attach an external USB drive to the server
+ At the server, boot from Ghost 2003 CD or Ghost boot floppies
+ Image the (dynamic) shadow disk the external USB drive
+ Remove the shadow disk from the server and keep it in a safe place
+ Put a new SCSI disk in the server (as SCSI ID 0, the new primary disk)
+ Boot from the Ghost CD again and restore the image to the new primary
SCSI
+ (this will restore the image as a "basic" disk rather than a dynamic
disk)
+ Disconnect the external USB drive
+ Put SBS 2003 CD1 in the CD drive and boot to the recovery console
+ Run the command FIXMBR against the new primary SCSI drive
+ Reboot and test, test, test for a few days to make sure everything works
+ Put the original shadow disk back in the server
+ Boot the server and use the built in SCSI utility (which shows up after
the POST stuff) to reformat the original shadow disk
+ Reboot the server, go into Disk Management
+ Initialize the new (secondary) disk
+ Create a partition on it (any size will - say, 5 MB)
+ Delete the partition you just created
+ Make the primary and secondary disks Dynamic
+ Mirror the new primary drive to the reformatted secondary drive
+ Make a Fault Tolerant Floppy disk for the system
+ Disconnect the primary disk, insert the FT Floppy and boot from it to
make sure it works
+ Also see if you can boot directly from the newly prepared shadow disk


--
Merv Porter [SBS-MVP]
============================

"BrianMultiLanguage" <BrianMultiLanguage@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:F5916E32-1E95-4AC1-92D9-8D11148F6187@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
item 1. YES
item 2. NO. (didn't know, thought MS OS mirroring took care of the
process.)
item 3. NO.

"Merv Porter [SBS-MVP]" wrote:

When you changed the shadow drive to SCSI ID 0, did you also physically
remove the primary drive and put the shadow drive into the SCSI change in
the same place as the primary drive? This may be necessary.

When you created the mirror, did you first create a small partition on
the
shadow drive, then delete it so that the MBR was copied to the shadow
drive,
making it bootable?

When you created the mirror, did you create a fault tolerant boot disk (a
floppy) so that you could boot from it if things went pear-shaped?

HOW TO: Create a Boot Disk for an NTFS or FAT Partition in the Windows
Server 2003 Family
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325879

--
Merv Porter [SBS-MVP]
============================

"BrianMultiLanguage" <BrianMultiLanguage@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
in
message news:DFE00755-7048-4DCE-B451-80318A2DAA3E@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
How do you set the drive to acitve and system?


"Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]" wrote:

Primary partition not set as active? Any help here?

Reasons why Windows NT does not boot from a shadow mirror drive
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/167045

"BrianMultiLanguage" <BrianMultiLanguage@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote
in
message news:AB999382-0796-4CDF-B550-0D532BAB36BE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I have 2 scsi drives, scsi-id-0 and scsi-id-1. id-0 failed.
I can not get server to boot from id-1.
I set id-1 to id-o, nothing after the bios screen, just a black
screen
from
bios and no failures.

It is as if the drive is not active or the boot.ini file is not
being
read.
All three volumes are on the drive.

Need some ideas quickly!
ps- when booting from cd1 of sbs2003, it does not see C:\.








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