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Booting to mirrored drive

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5 replies

by tdigirolamo

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I have a Windows 2000 server running two hot swappable mirrored drives. I also have another server of the same exact model. I want to take the mirrored drive out of server number one, and boot up server number two with it (off the LAN of course). If I just place the drive in and start it up, it gets as far as the "Starting Windows 2000" at the bottom of the screen and then goes in to a loop of restarting itself. I've read all the articles on FT boot disks and the boot.ini file, but can't seem to get it to work. The 4 values in both lines of my boot.ini are 0,0,0,1. Is it as simple as just changing one of those values on the FT floppy's boot.ini? If so, which one?

5 replies

by nixarie

Break the mirror on the first server, and take the PRIMARY drive and put it in the second server. The first server should boot off the mirror and the second off the main drive.

Good luck.

by azizhakim

As you know NT boots from system partition,loads os from boot partition.if you remove the mirrored drive and plug into another machine the system partition is non existent although you have made it primary on ide or lun#0 on scsi.you will be able to boot if you made a boot floppy which points to the partition where NT resides(BOOT PARTITION)Are you with me so far.It is a mirrored volume remember.If you removed the primary disk(SYSTEM VOLUME) and moved it on the other machine as primary ALL IS WELL It will boot,but you you move the other drive which is not system drive you have to help NT with the system files ie ntldr,ntdetect and boot .ini which yiou must edit to point to secondary drive to load os,in you case edit boot ini like
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1) if secondary on First controller or
multi(1)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) if primary on second controller
I hope this has helped you,If not you will have to go through NT boot process and ARC path definitions to have a better grasp,It is tricky but not difficult.Lood luck

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