booting from ide-raid drive

[Irwin]

I am still trying to boot from the IDE drive on the IDE-raid
controller. Rather than take my working boot drive off the primary IDE
connector and mess that up, I instead used the Maxblast 4 CD to copy
the boot partition from the working primary IDE drive up in the CD cage
down to the IDE-raid connected drive in the HD cage, the desired final
location. That worked fine. In windows, with the IDE-raid drivers
installed, all the files look like they are there. When I disconnect
the primary IDE drive to protect it and set BIOS to boot the IDE-raid
drive, I get a No OS found. I used maxblast to set the boot MBR on the
drive, but no change. What am I doing wrong?

Thank you.

 

[fj]

I am still trying to boot from the IDE drive on the IDE-raid
controller. Rather than take my working boot drive off the primary IDE
connector and mess that up, I instead used the Maxblast 4 CD to copy
the boot partition from the working primary IDE drive up in the CD cage
down to the IDE-raid connected drive in the HD cage, the desired final
location. That worked fine. In windows, with the IDE-raid drivers
installed, all the files look like they are there. When I disconnect
the primary IDE drive to protect it and set BIOS to boot the IDE-raid
drive, I get a No OS found. I used maxblast to set the boot MBR on the
drive, but no change. What am I doing wrong?

Isn't that because boot.ini is pointing to the location of the first drive?
I'm pretty sure that you need to edit boot.ini so it's pointing to the new
location of your system drive.

 

[Irwin]

I thought of that. I believe it is not true for the following reasons.
First, it is the wrong error message. With the boot.ini pointing to the
wrong thing, I am used to getting the "can't find NTLDR" error, not the
"No OS" error. Second, after giving up on copying the partition,
disconnecting the first drive and setting the second as bootable which
didn't work, we instead bit the bullet and just moved the boot drive
down onto the IDE-RAID, which worked fine despite having the same
boot.ini as the copy.

Given the chain of MBR, boot record, and NTLDR processes, the only
thing that makes sense to me was the wrong MBR. The boot record and
NTLDR should have been cloned exactly by the Maxblast program, though I
of course can't confirm that without comparing them bit-by-bit which I
think I will not attempt. I had hoped that using the Maxblast to fix
the MBR would work, but it didn't.

The last thing I had considered was using a Bootmagic floppy to make
the partition bootable. Firstly, I don't have a floppy in the machine
right now, which I suppose I could have fixed easily enough. Secondly,
and most importantly to me as per my prior questions, I didn't think
the Bootmagic floppy would see the drive without the Mobo drivers. At
least one other poster suggests that it would just work since maybe
BIOS support was available, if I understand his message, but it is too
late since we moved the disk and it is done. I would have been
interested to see the results.

Thanks anyhow.