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Disaster Recovery

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by d squared

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I have to mirrored drives in my NT 4 server.The system partition and the data partitions are mirrored. The primary drive failed so the secondary drive is now primary. However the system will not boot to this drive. I have to boot with a boot diskto get the server up. I have gone into disk administrator and broke the mirror and checked that the partition was active which it was. The boot files are on the proper partion but nothing happens without the boot disk. What am I missing?

5 replies

by seth_lerman

Are the drives in this system IDE or SCSI? If SCSI, you need to go either A) change the SCSI ID of the backup drive to what the primary drive was, or B) go into the SCSI host adapters setup (hitting CTRL-A on an Adaptec card for example) and changethe boot ID. If the system is trying to boot from ID0, and there is no bootable device at that ID, it can't boot. Also, if you change the system to boot from a different SCSI ID, you will also have to change the boot properties in BOOT.INI to match.

If IDE, you will need to physically reconfigure the drives. For example, you have always boot from the Primary/Master. That drive is now dead. You mirror was Secondary/Master. You need to move it to Primary/Master to boot from it.

by ins413

One thing that you may try is looking into the boot.ini file. Make sure your ARC path is pointing to the new drive. This is easily solved by opening boot.ini in notepad and changing and entry such as disk(?) or rdisk(?) where ? is the old number and replace it with the new number. I have run into this with mirrored drives many times. Let me know how it goes.

by d squared

ARC path is the same as the one on the disk and it boots fine from that it just won't boot on it's own.

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