Renaming system drive

[Guest]

I posted this earlier, but apparently to the wrong newsgroup so I'll try
here. I have a Win2k Server with a RAID 5 (D for data and a dynamic
mirrored disk0 and
disk1 (C drive. Disk1 failed and it was not possible to regenerate the
mirror so was removed. After installing a new drive, I found Disk0 has a
number of bad sectors and, therefore, will not regenerate the mirror to the
new disk. I do have a backup of drive C:, registry and system state, so if I
name the new drive Z: (Disk1) from Disk Management and restore C: to it,
then remove the old Disk0 C: drive and move the drive Z: to Disk 0 position,
will Windows automatically rename the new drive from Z: to C: when it
restarts? Also, will there be a problem restoring C: to Disk1 when there
already exists a C: drive on Disk0?

Thanks for your quick response

 

[Ray H]

You should be able to restore your backup and system state to "Disk 1" and
then check the BOOT.INI file to make sure your partition information is
correct. Shut down your server and remove "Disk 0". Move "Disk 1" and make
any changes you need to match the settings on "Disk 0" (i.e. SCSI ID, IDE
Master, etc). You should be able to restart your server and it will boot
from the newly installed disk. W2K should recognize this partition as "C:"
in Disk Management and you should see an error for "Z:" that it is missing.
Go ahead and delete "Z:".

You should not have any trouble restoring the backup and system state as the
BOOT.INI file is letting W2K know where to look for startup files. While
you are changing drives I would get a new drive and install it as the mirror
to your newly installed "C:"

 

[Guest]

Well, it sounded like a good plan, but resulted in needing a boot disk to
bring up the OS and then not being able to log on as I was promptly returned
to the logon screen after entering the password. I used a remote registry
connection to remove the Winlogon path of the userinit value, so I could at
least logon. When I did, I saw that the Z: drive had not been renamed to C:,
so I changed that in the registry, restored the System State, checked the
boot.ini file which still pointed to Disk0, partition1, and rebooted. Again
requiring a boot disk I now got the BSOD with, I believe the 0x0000007B stop
error, so went to Last Known Good. So now I'm looking at my new C: drive, my
D: RAID5 data drive, my old C: drive showing missing, Offline and also as the
"system drive". No wonder it can't boot, but how do I fix it? I was
thinking of using the Win2K CD to do a Manual Repair. Which set of files to
repair do I select?

I haven't yet deleted the old C: drive. If I do that and then have to go
back to utilizing the old C: drive, it breaks my RAID5 which then requires
regenerating and I'm not interested in corrupting my data. I did try
deleting it earlier, thinking that Windows would then make the new C: drive
the "System" drive and boot from there as it should. That resulted in the
BSOD also.

Going in circles. Help!

You should be able to restore your backup and system state to "Disk 1" and
then check the BOOT.INI file to make sure your partition information is
correct. Shut down your server and remove "Disk 0". Move "Disk 1" and make
any changes you need to match the settings on "Disk 0" (i.e. SCSI ID, IDE
Master, etc). You should be able to restart your server and it will boot
from the newly installed disk. W2K should recognize this partition as "C:"
in Disk Management and you should see an error for "Z:" that it is missing.
Go ahead and delete "Z:".

You should not have any trouble restoring the backup and system state as the
BOOT.INI file is letting W2K know where to look for startup files. While
you are changing drives I would get a new drive and install it as the mirror
to your newly installed "C:"