death situation

[Dhaval Brahmbhatt]

Hi there

I think everyone will laugh at the situation that I am in, but I need
desperate help.

One of our customers has a clone server, so you can imagine specs etc. But
it is weired and wonderful.

The graphics card is AGP and has stopped working in such a way that we do
not get anything on the monitor connected to the server, although, the
server boots up fine when booted in to the VGA mode. Just imagine how one
can boot the server in the VGA mode when not seeing anything on the monitor.
(we time our keystrokes wonderfully, when we know it is in the booting
stage, we press F8 key and then blindly, we press the down arrow key 4 times
which slects the VGA mode and then enter.) We can use terminal services to
look at the server.

Now comes the biggest problem. The server has 2 SCSI disks and we just added
2 more IDE disks. Follwoing is the current configuration.

Disk 0: new IDE disk
Disk 1: new IDW disk
Disk 2: SCSI disk
Disk 3: SCSI disk.


on Disk2 we had C drive (where the OS is installed) and another partition
called E drive. on the disk 3, we had only one partition spanning the whole
disk 3. I deleted that partition so that I could mirror the C drive on disk
2 with a partition on disk 3.

So now, we have a mirror. A partition on the disk 2 called C: is mirrored to
a partition on disk 3, so obviously on both the disks, it says C:

But while I did this, it said you have mirrored your boot volume. Please
configure your boot.ini file to boot from the correct partition.

Now, I don't know what should be the syntex in the boot.ini file. It is the
ARC naming convention which I am not sure about as to what to change.

So in short, if I reboot now, the server will not come up again if the
boot.ini is not configured properly. Now add the graphics problem to that.
Can't see nothing so if it goes wrong, I have no clue what to do since we
have tried so many different graphics card.


Please help. The only thing I can do is to get the boot.ini file syntex
correct.


Please help.

Anonymous

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Dhaval

You could boot from a boot floppy, if something would go wrong. Format a
floppy from within your operating system. Next, copy the files boot.ini,
ntdetect.com, ntldr and possibly ntbootdd.sys (if it exists in C:\) to the
floppy. By the way, if you add the switch /basevideo in your boot.ini, you
would boot into VGA mode. In total, you can have ten different ARC paths in
boot.ini, and test your way.

If the computer was booting after you added the IDE disks, then mirroring
shouldn't change your ARC path. This would also indicate that your machine
still considers your SCSI controller as the first controller.

In order to boot into your mirrored disk, you would need to add a line with
the correct ARC path to this disk. Without knowing the content of your
current working boot.ini it's hard to say what it should be, but either
rdisk(0) should be rdisk(1), or disk(0) should be disk(1).

This MS Knowledge Base explains more about the ARC path:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=102873

And, did you check the monitor?

Best regards

Bjorn