Re: Dead Disk 0 in 2003 mirror
What do you mean with "Blade is co-located"?
If you read the links I quoted in my first reply then you will
see that booting off the second half of a mirror may or may
not work. It depends on a number of conditions. I tried it
myself a few days ago with an SBS installation. It worked
even though the disks were quite different. I have also seen
installations where it did not work.
In view of the extremely tight constraints you have to work
under, you must be very well prepared. Here is what I would
do before the weekend:
- Get a couple of IDE disks.
- Install them in some PC.
- Install Server 2003 on this PC.
- Convert the disks to dynamic, then create a mirror.
- See if you can boot from either of the disks.
Not having a floppy disk drive in the server is no excuse at
all. Be a little versatile - you have two ways to get around
the problem:
a) Temporarily connect a spare FDD to the server.
b) Create a bootable CD instead of a bootable floppy disk.
Again it is essential that you test this technique well before
the weekend. You simply won't have the time to muck
around and burn bootable CDs!
If I was in your position then I would negotiate for a longer
outage. You should also do your homework for future
occasions. The following thoughts come to the mind:
- Since your downtimes are so limited, you must spend
some time to go through a number of disaster scenarios
in your mind. What would you do if you had some severe
file system corruption? A motherboard failure? A Windows
malfunction?
- When you have your disaster recovery plan, you must
test it. What's the good of having mirrored disks if you
have never dealt with a failed disk?
- A disk mirror appears to be grossly inadequate for
your situation. A hot-swappable RAID array seems
compulsory in your case. Again you must test it.
"lasangne" <lasangne@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:793B997D-5B86-48AF-97E7-4A0749C88518@microsoft.com...
> Hi Pegasus,
>
> I have 2 problems, 1) Blade is colocated 2) there is no floppy disk
> available.
> But your link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/167045/EN-US/ does give me a
> couple of handles I can try. In Disk Manager it says about Disk 0 (where I
> changed the boot.ini to boot to Disk 1) Failed System and it says about
> Disk
> 1 Healthy Boot. Both disks are Dynamic disks. But what I asked about
> changing
> the Bios to Boot to the secondary Disk 1 and changing the boot.ini on Disk
> 1
> (original half of the mirror) to boot to Disk 1 will tht work? I have
> permission to try and fix it this weekend with a 1 hour window that the
> Server may be offline, so I need to know if it will work.
> this is a copy of the boot.ini on Disk 0 and what I will use on Disk 1:
>
> [boot loader]
> timeout=30
> default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
> [operating systems]
> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Boot Mirror C: - secondary
> plex"
> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003,
> Standard"
> /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut
>
> Thanks for your time and help,
>
> Lasangne
>
> "Pegasus (MVP)" wrote:
>
>>
>> Have a look here about booting from a broken mirror:
>> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;113977
>> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/167045/EN-US/
>>
>> About your specific question: You are the best person to answer
>> it. Simply create a boot diskette, making sure to have lots of
>> menu lines in it like so:
>>
>> [boot loader]
>> timeout=5
>> default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
>> [operating systems]
>> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="1 Microsoft Windows XP
>> Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
>> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="2 Microsoft Windows XP
>> Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
>> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="3 Microsoft Windows XP
>> Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
>> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="4 Microsoft Windows XP
>> Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
>> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS="5 Microsoft Windows XP
>> Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
>> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)\WINDOWS="6 Microsoft Windows XP
>> Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
>>
>> Now try them all, one after the other, and change your master/
>> slave settings too. The whole test should take less than ten minutes.
>>
>>
>>