Cannot boot to software raid mirror

Question

I have spent the better part of my work day trying to figure out how to recover from a potential faulty drive setup with a Windows (2000 server standard, in this case) mirror. I am almost there, but not quite. I've poked through various documents, but nothing so far. I have setup the mirror just fine. In my example, I have pulled the first drive in the mirror to simulate it going bad. I moved the second disk, which was good, to the primary position. I booted to it fine with a floppy disk containing a boot.ini (points to new location of the good disk), ntldr and ntdetect.com. Once in windows, I break the mirror, make sure the boot.ini in the C: drive points to the disk now that it's in the primary location, and everything looks ok. However, when I try to reboot without the floppy disk, it just sits there after detecting the hard drive and doesn't go any further. I've tried to do recovery with the server CD and run fixboot and fixmbr. They run fine, but again--I'm left without the system booting from hard drive--only from the floppy diskette with the 3 files. Is there some obvious step I'm leaving out? What do I need to do to make the system boot from the hard drive when trying to recover? EDIT: On day two now. I'm fairly sure Windows mirroring is a joke except for recovery. No possible way to boot from the hard drive on the mirrored drive so far.

DELL-GaryS · Answer

Hi Espigle,

I agree with your analysis, S/W RAID is more difficult to recover.

When the boot.ini edit fails, usually what hapens is that the first disk has a Dell utility partition on it and the second disk does not, then when they modify the boot.ini file they leave it pointing to partition two, which would be their D: partition on the mirror drive.

I usually tell people to use the FDISK utility on the second disk to create a partition matching the utility partition size on the second drive before they do the S/W mirroring.

DELL-GaryS · Answer

Hi espigle,    Look at this article and confirm that you've set up the boot.INI on the mirrored disk correctly.   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/102873/EN-US/

espigle · Answer

The boot.ini file has been confirmed to be setup properly and it has been tested.  Currently the boot.ini resides on a floppy along with the ntldr and ntdetect.com files.  This floppy can boot the mirrored drive just fine (after I move it over to the primary spot).  In some previous testing I also booted the second drive with a boot.ini that reflected the drive sitting on the second IDE controller.   At this juncture, we have moved forward and will not be testing this any longer.  I put in two good days of research, experimenting and loads of failure.  I have assumed the position that if we have a drive failure with our Windows mirror setup that I will just have to settle with booting the second drive (if that's the one that didn't fail) from a floppy.  The problem appears most certainly to be related to the second drive not having a boot sector, and my inability to create one to allow the hard drive to boot from itself instead of having to use a floppy such as I mentioned above.   Thanks for your help in the matter.  I think my solution is I will avoid software based RAID for any future needs of setting up RAID.

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

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