Problem Copying Dynamic Boot Device to New Boot Device

[CHANGE USERNAME TO westes]

Do Dynamic devices have any concept of an "Active" partition to boot from,
the way that old style "Basic" devices did? If not, I'm unable to explain
the following as anything but a bug in dynamic devices under Windows 2000:

With "Basic" disks, I have a 7.8 GB boot partition on a 9GB drive. I use
a partition copying utility like PowerQuest ServerMagic to copy this
partition to a 36GB drive. I then mark the partition on the target drive
as "Active". I am able to boot from the 36GB device with the original
partition without any problem.

Now what happens using a Dynamic Disk instead? My Windows 2000 Server
boots from a 7.8 GB dynamic disk. I use the Windows 2000 mirror feature to
make a mirror of the boot partition on the 36GB drive. Now if I attempt to
make the 36GB drive the boot device, the Windows 2000 partition never loads!
Moreover, it looks to me as if the disk has no active partition set on it
and it just times out looking for one.

Since Windows 2000 itself includes no way to make a specific partition on a
Dynamic device active, how exactly do we make this new device bootable?

 

[Jisha]

I'm NOT an expert by any means on this... but my understanding of the
dynamic drive includes something about win2000 puts "bogus entries" in the
normal boot areas and actually stores the relevant info in a file located at
the end of the disk.

There's a thread in microsoft.public.win2000.general that touches on this
.... sorry can't locate it right now for you...

chris

 

[Jeff Patterson [MSFT]]

Will,

Take a look at the following articles:

167045 Reasons Why Windows NT Does Not Boot From a Shadow Mirror Drive
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=167045

313061 HOW TO: Regenerate a Dynamic Mirrored Volume in Windows 2000
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=313061

Jeff Patterson
Microsoft Support