after recreating mirror hard disk doesnot boot

[Guest]

Hi all,
I had two hard disks (call it A and B)which were mirrored and eventually
the master drive(A) failed. So I used the Fault toelant disk to boot to the
second drive(B) successfully. Since my failed drive(A) had bad sectors I
replaced it with another new disk(call C) and recreated the mirror. But after
that when i restart it doesnot boot from the new disk. Everytime I have to
use the Floppy disk with boot.ini pointing to the now working drive(B).
What should I do to boot from the new drive(c) ? I would like to avoid
using the floppy disk everytime to boot. Is there any solution for this ?

Thanks in advance .

regards,
Abraham

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Abraham

Boot to the recovery console and use the command FIXMBR, see this MS
Knowledge Base article:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=318752

Also read this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=266745

Best regards

Bjorn

 

[Guest]

Thanks Bjorn for your help. But I still have the problem persisting. I will
give more info regarding the issue. The current situation is as follows.

I have two physical SCSI disks(call them A and B) 140 GB each.
Both are dynamic disks.
Drive A has one Volume C : on it
Drive B has two voulmes C and G
Drive B is mirrored to Drive A for volume C only.
SCSI ID for Drive is 0 and drive B is 2 (not 1).
I am using fault tolent floppy to boot to Drive B and its working fine.
I tried booting from the Win @K CD and issued the commands fixboot c and
fixmbr on Drive A .
Still when I start, after the BIOS there is no message at all. Its looks
like the system has stoped with a cursor blinking.
If I use the floppy it again boots from Drive B as usual.

Is there anything I can do for making the Drive A to boot or how can I make
sure its is bootable.

Thanks for any help.

Regards,
Abraham

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Abraham

If your hard disk is missing the Master Boot Record, MBR, booting will
result in a blinking cursor on an otherwise black screen, so this most
probably is your problem.

When you use software mirroring, you mirror partitions, and, since the MBR
is not a part of a partition, the MBR is not mirrored.

Your old disk A obviously had an MBR (it booted), but your disk B and the
new disk A probably doesn't have it.

FIXMBR should work, what it is supposed to do is just to write the MBR, in
order to solve this problem. I have no explanation why it didn't work for
you.

A possibility would be to break the mirror, delete the volume on disk A,
revert the disk to basic, and create a partition on it. This also writes
the MBR, so - after this - you could delete the partition again, upgrade to
dynamic and re-mirror.

Another possibility would be to use a third party utility, called MBRtool,
downloadable from: http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/

Best regards

Bjorn

 

[Guest]

Thanks bjorn for ur advice.
I tried the steps u suggested by breaking the mirror ,removing the mirror
and deleting the voulme on disk A. Then I reverted it to a basic disk ,
created a partition on it F:. It then asked to restart and after that I made
the partition active.
Then I upgraded the disk to dynamic, deleted the partition and again
mirrod the volume. But still no chance. So I tried recovery console and used
fixmbr and fixboot. I checked the messages and confirmed that it was writing
the mbr. But it didnt boot.
Tthen I strongly doubted that may be the disk itself has some prob. So I
removed disk A and then reformated it with Win2K CD and started. Fine, it was
booting. But I didnot fully instal the OS. So it stopped showng NTLDR missing
error. But I am sure abt the MBR.
Now I am stuck what to do. If I put the disk back will it conflict with
the Disk B as both of them have C: now. So what i am planning to do is I
will use the disk A on another Windows 200 server machine, install the OS,
mirror it with another disk and then delte the volume on disk A. Then I will
put the Disk A again back to the production machine. What do u think ? Will
it work or as soon as I delete the volume on disk A will it delte the MBR
also ?

Thanks for u adivce again.

Regards,
Abraham

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Abraham

Sorry I couldn't answer sooner, I have been on a business trip a couple of
days.

Deleting a partition from disk A should not delete the MBR.

If you attach disk A to the target computer, and then boot using your
floppy that loads Windows from disk B, the partition on disk A will not
conflict with your current Windows installation. The partition on disk A
will get the first available drive letter, and you should be able to delete
the partition using Disk Management, convert the disk to dynamic, and then
re-mirror.

Best regards

Bjorn