Recovery Console - fix MBR - shadow mirror drive

[Martijn Haverhoek]

Hi All,

I have a simple intel based PC, running Windows 2000 Small Business Server.
It has 1 IDE disk (which has bad blocks).
This weekend I added an additional IDE disk to it. Converted both disks to
dynamic disks. Created a mirror of the system partition and the boot
partition.
After regeneration, both disks were healthy and correctly mirrored.

Now, I removed the faulty (primary) disk and placed the mirrored (shadow)
disk on the IDE cable of that disk (changed jumper settings to master).

Since MBR's are not mirrored, the only way to boot this configuration was
with a Win2K bootfloppy I made.
I now want to fix the MBR on this disk, but I am unable to get into the
Recovery Console, because the boot.ini states:

C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons

And this is not accessible because there is no MBR that says where C: is (I
think).
I am also unable to start the Recovery Console using the Windows 2000 Server
CD (at bootup), nor the Windows 2000 setup floppies.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Martijn Haverhoek
MCP NT4 | MCSE2000 | ISA 2000 cert
The Hague, Holland

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Martijn

You didn't tell us what happens when you try to start the recovery console,
from boot.ini, from CD or from floppies.

The MBR is a x86 industry standard. It contains no information about
partitions or folders. It reads the partition table, finds the active
partition and passes over execution to the partition boot sector.

If the folder CMDCONS is still there, remove or rename it, break the mirror
(if you haven't already done this) and try reinstalling the recovery
console.

Best regards

Bjorn

 

[Martijn Haverhoek]

When I try to start the recovery console from boot.ini I get an error that
\System32\NTOSKRNL.EXE could not be found.
When I try to start the setup process from floppies/cd I get a blue screen:
STOP: hardware or disk error.

hope this helps, thanks.

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Martijn

Did you try breaking the mirror and reinstalling the Recovery Console? Is
the CMDCONS folder still there?

Does the blue screen generate anything more than "STOP: hardware or disk
error", for instance a hex code?

AT what stage do you get this STOP error?

Did you need any third party disk controller drivers when you installed
Win2000? In that case you will need to F6 and install the driver also when
you start the recovery console:

Use the Windows 2000 CD-ROM to start the computer, and then press F6 to
install a third-party SCSI or RAID driver. Press S to specify an additional
device, and then insert the floppy disk that contains the correct driver
for your disk controller. Press R to repair a Windows 2000 installation.
Press C to use the recovery console.

Another option might be to use a low level disk editor to add a working
MBR.

To avoid the problem with a missing MBR in the future, create a partition
on the disk you intend to mirror to, in order to create the MBR, then
delete the partition again, before you upgrade the disk to dynamic.

Best regards

Bjorn